Watershed Management Group (WMG)

Watershed Management Group's Living Lab is a bilingual educational center for sustainable desert living in mid-town Tucson. It offers exhibits, classes, and tours in both English and Spanish, serves all ages from across the border region, and attracts national and global visitorsreaching about 3,000 people annually. At the Living Lab and Learning Center we organize a Docent program as well as an annual paid internship program for college students.The River Run Network, a program of WMG, is a group of people working to achieve our 50-year vision of restoring Tucson's heritage of flowing creeks and rivers and includes over 3,500 River Run Network members distributed throughout Southern AZ in the Santa Cruz Watershed. Through this program, Watershed Management Group offers creek walks, river restoration workshops, river clean-ups, and community science monitoring.Watershed Management Groups Water Harvesting Certification provides professionals, educators, and community organizers with comprehensive instruction in water harvesting systems design and construction, training about 40 people annually through two week-long courses. Hundreds of households participate annually in our Build Your Own Basin program participating in a two hour hands-on workshop learning how to build a rain garden with native plants. After participating, households take home a free Build Your Own Basin kit with native plants, organic mulch, and a how-to guide.Through our Schoolyard Program and Family Saturdays we bring nature education to kids and families including limited income families and underserved youth. Activities focus on access to clean, local water sources, such as rainwater harvesting; learning how to steward the plants, animals, and rivers of the Sonoran Desert; and learning how to turn waste into resources to compost, grow food, and conserve energy.Watershed Management Group also offers free in-person and virtual classes on sustainable desert living in the greater Tucson and Phoenix regions.