The goal of the project was to increase education and outreach to the UCSC community on storm water practices and knowledge. Pollution of storm water is widespread, occurring all over the world. The UCSC campus mission states that we have an environmental responsibility, which our project will fulfill over the next three years, as it becomes implemented and the community is educated on how their actions can directly influence or reduce contamination to the storm drains on campus. In order to achieve this, we have strategized to increase our distribution of materials by outreaching to various departments and staff members, providing resources in case of a storm water concern, making the information easy to read and easily available, while covering both general and specific storm water issues. At the end of the 2013-2014 school year, we measured our success by the completion of a comprehensive handbook to guide future outreaching efforts, and also by our accomplishments in preparation of future outreaching.

Over the course of this year, we finished a comprehensive community outreach handbook draft. In it, we have 15 brochures that we included, and have discussed in detail how we plan to utilize them. We developed a google folder containing all of the brochures to be used as a resource for future interns. Of the brochures needing to be updated, we have modified 100% of them. We also created a pesticides brochure for removing ants. The Storm Water Management Program’s Facebook was used to provide brochures to the public, promoted two events on campus, and was updated with the spring intern hike, Earth Summit, and SpringFest. In compliance with the storm water permit, the website cleanwater.ucsc.edu, was updated during spring quarter. We modified the homepage, background page, internship page, FAQ page, and added a brochure page. We also created a “10 Tips” section from scratch, as part of the FAQ tab. Besides for making the brochures available online, we also distributed the “Runoff and Management” brochure to the 10 colleges on campus at the Residential Life Offices and Program’s Offices. We tabled at Earth Summit 2014 and displayed a poster at SpringFest. To further our future outreaching efforts, we have added a section to the Intern Handbook which gives tips and suggestions for repeating the events/distribution in the future.