Alliance for Puget Sound Natural Resources applies a powerful approach that gives all stakeholders a voice and the motivation to help improve water quality in our Puget Sound watersheds.
cross-sector leadership
Diverse and powerful voices.
The Alliance is a collaboration of leaders from agriculture, aquaculture, tribal, and conservation and farmland preservation nonprofit organizations. Our interests and expertise are diverse. Yet we have a shared vision: help Puget Sound recover, and preserve its natural resources for future generations. To accomplish this, the Alliance presents an influential and collective voice in public and private-sector settings. Together we:
Advocate for funding and policy, enabling multiple benefit projects such as integrated watershed plans.
Advocate for coordinated investment among state and federal agencies and elected officials.
Provide a powerful networking resource that helps local collaboratives connect to beneficial partners, advisers, and other resources.
a model of collaboration
Working together to achieve better and lasting outcomes.
Collaboration enables everything we do. It’s at the foundation of the Alliance and the local-level watershed stewardship initiatives we support. Collaboration builds accessible social capital within our watershed communities. It bridges community divides and promotes shared learning and action. Collaboration produces sustainable outcomes. Our collaborative model incorporates:
- Multiple stakeholders, strengthening connections between local stakeholders including government, private landowners, business interests, tribes and conservation groups.
- A multiple benefit emphasis that considers all stakeholders equally, integrates social, economic and environmental priorities, and achieves greater value through integrated planning.
- Compiling and sharing best practices and success stories that inform and inspire more collaboration.
neighboring up
Investing in community leadership and engagement.
We support local, community-led solutions that gain strength from a sense of place and pride. “Neighboring up” taps the knowledge and ingenuity of community leaders and stakeholders, instead of deferring to government regulation to address water quality issues.
Community stakeholders have intimate knowledge of local economics, as well as the cultural and social environment. They have a vested interest in creating lasting, effective multiple-benefit solutions.
Our strategies for community leadership and engagement include:
- Build on local leadership and investing in the social capital that can forge a common vision for healthier watersheds.
- Advocate for state and federal support for community engagement.
- Provide a powerful networking resource that helps local collaboratives connect to beneficial partners, advisors and other resources.
rewarding stewardship
Exploring and supporting marketplace incentives for stewardship.
We harness the culture of the Puget Sound region to nurture marketplace solutions that make good stewardship on farms economically rewarding. First, local and organic are powerful consumer values that impact the farming industry, however sustainable practices lack similar visibility. Second, there are inherent economic benefits of dairy manure that have not been fully explored, developed or encouraged.
To tap into these markets and help monetize sustainable farm practices, we:
- Build awareness and demand for food produced with sustainable farming practices among consumers, chefs, restaurants and retailers who can use their purchasing power to reward producers who farm in that way.
- Explore markets for nutrient products that value surplus nutrients (dairy manure) for energy, compost, etc., transforming an environmental liability into an economic opportunity that also enhances the health of Puget Sound.