logo


Advocacy

South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition is an advocate for the silent streams that course their way through our urbanized Santa Clara Valley, who cannot speak for themselves. We strive to promote a vibrant wildlife environment, a healthy eco-system, and pure waters.

We have done this work in a number of ways:

  • We encourage our government agencies to ensure that creek and riverbanks are free of trash and contaminants. This often leads to conflicting social demands with the homeless as well as the conflict of limited budgets for trash collection in hard to reach places. For example, we work very closely with the Parks & Recreation Departments in the City of San Jose and with their Adop-A-Park program because they rely on volunteers to keep many of the parks and trails clear of trash.
  • We conduct Community Meetings and attend a number of Community Events throughout the year to build awareness, to educate people on conditions in our watershed, and to seek out like-minded people who will volunteer to help us at future cleanups.
  • We promote respectable eco-citizenship with our educational workshops to students at each grade level, ranging from grammar schools to colleges and universities, like San Jose State University.
  • We promote the health of native wildlife, such as beavers, otters, and spawning Chinook salmon and steelhead trout. We installed cameras to follow the daily life our resident beaver family, and we post the videos on social media to draw attention to the possibilities of wildlife in our urban environment. We also created a wildlife brochure to draw attention to the native wildlife that lives and uses our waterway corridors.
  • We are advocates for invasive plant removal to promote waterway health and biomass removal from our streams which attract trash and prevent fish from migrating up the river. Invasive plants such as ivy or bamboo overuse limited water and, spread aggressively in our mild climate, but they don’t provide any shade. On the contrary trees like native oaks spread their limbs across the water and promote cooler waters for a much more conducive eco-system for all of us.