Sadly for Winer, she’s no Powerball winner. Instead, the watershed planner with the Ellicott City based non-profit Center for Watershed Protection keeps the novelty check (which is made out in the amount of $12,000) solely for chuckles. “That’s our obnoxiousness, actually,” she tells me mystifyingly.

Since 1992 the Center has been using funds from a range of sources, like the Chesapeake Bay Trust (who issued Winer’s souvenir, and most likely a smaller companion to be cashed), in their efforts to protect watersheds. In those eleven years the group has weathered a growth spurt LeBron James would be envious of. “Actually, it was just me to start out with,” says the Center’s executive director, Tom Schueler. “We’ve grown from a staff of pretty much nothing, to eighteen.”

Today the organization’s staff members have academic backgrounds that skew heavily towards the scientific – even their financial officer holds an environmental degree. And all of that knowledge is pointed collectively towards a “multi-disciplinary strategy to watershed protection,” as stated by their mission. What that means is a multi-pronged approach to protecting that stream that runs through your neighborhood that includes planning, restoration, research, stormwater management, education, and training.

What that means is that the Center works with whoever needs their help in protecting or restoring watersheds: citizens, governments, developers – you name it. The Center seems to do it all, stopping just shy of getting entangled in matters of public policy.

“We focus on creating the research and then disseminating it,” says the Center’s communications director, Heather Holland, perhaps the group’s only employee without a degree in science. Holland explains that the Center performs a good deal of fee-for-service work. “That means, for instance, the city of Burlington, Vermont, will hire us to do a stream assessment.” She estimates that there are about 3500 watershed groups in the country. “Our job is to get these technical resources to these people so they can make a difference in their local watersheds.”

While Holland is obviously excited about the growth of the organization, she stops well short of gloating: an increased demand on the Center’s services is a sure sign there’s a lot of work to be done to protect watersheds.

Included in the Center’s 2001-2002 annual report is a bright yellow map of the United States. Places where the organization has done work are noted with red stars, most of which are concentrated in the mid-Atlantic region. The Center is pretty up-front about the East Coast bias; after all that’s where they’re located, and there’s not as drastic a need for watershed protection in the more arid Western side of the country.

Interestingly, what the staff of the Center realizes is that at the mere mention of watersheds, eyes tend to glaze over. “Sometimes the problems we’re dealing with make you want to cry. Because the issues can be complex and sometimes kind of dry to the average person, we try to use humor to get those messages across,” says Schueler.

What Schueler fears many people don’t realize is that everybody lives in a watershed, which is simply the aggregate of all those gullies, streams, ditches, tributaries, or rivers within an area of land. So it stands to reason that everybody can do their part. “I think there’s so little sense of the connection that your daily activity has to your environment,” says Holland. “There’s stuff everybody can do, from not washing your car on the pavement, to picking up your dog waste.”

The collection of engineers and researchers now crowds two offices on Main Street, and commanded a budget of just under $1.5 million for the 2001 fiscal year, with almost 90 percent of that money dedicated to program expenses. Schueler is quick to point out that big dollars are not necessarily a sign of success. “I guess we measure our success in protection to streams and watersheds on the ground – we don’t really measure it by how big our budget is.”

Still, the group is growing. After relocating to Ellicott City from Silver Spring about five years ago, the organization again expanded, taking over a neighboring office after about three years. “We’ve roughly doubled in size since we’ve been here,” Schueler says, adding that the organization is eyeing more office space in Ellicott City to keep pace with their growth, while hoping to maintain a relaxed, small-office culture. “We don’t want to become the GM of watersheds,” he jokes.

The offices of the Center for Watershed Protection are crowded. Boxes filled with books have been shunted to spaces not already occupied by desks or people. Posters that range from overhead shots of rivers to pictures of fish in their natural habitat are plastered all over the walls. The dress code leans more towards the laid-back “no shoes, no shirt, no job” side of the spectrum, but even this demand seems malleable. “I don’t think anyone’s worn a tie here in like ten years,” says Schueler.

There’s good reason. The staff here is sometimes required to get dirty, as when they head out to sites to survey streams. Saying they always love it would be a bit of an overstatement. “Doing stream assessments in urban areas is not necessarily fun,” says Anne Kitchell, one of the organization’s watershed planners, as she leans back in her chair. “You’ve got to be careful in those places.”

Kitchell explains, telling me that in urban water areas there’s all sorts of trash and pet waste to be discovered during the course of a routine examination, and the fear that around the next bend lies a corpse seems to constantly loom overhead. “Not that I’ve ever found one,” she jokes.

Dressed in jeans, a faded sweatshirt and work boots, and seated in the office she shares with another Center employee, Kitchell explains to me how she ended up in the relatively obscure field of watershed protection. As an undergrad her background was in marine science and biology, which led her to research in mud flats that she unceremoniously explains as “blowing in worm tubes and measuring worm poop.” But behind the dismissive comment lies some pretty heavy science.

“When I got to grad school I realized nobody’s doing how to control development at the watershed level,” says Kitchell. She ended up writing a thesis with a title that she approximates at “Managing Impervious Covers in the Coastal Zone.” But she considers her current work with the Center as a sort of unofficial graduate degree. “There’s just not a school in the U.S. that sort of teaches that,” she says. “I’ve learned more here from these people than I would getting a Ph.D.”

Schueler, too, is a reflection of a range of subjects that he applies to get the job done. “I’m one of those composites of biology, engineering, economics, and planning,” he explains in a way that makes it seem as though you couldn’t take two steps without stumbling over such a composite.

Before founding the Center, Schueler worked in Washington, D.C. trying to restore the Anacostia River, something he notes is still being worked on to this day. Through his efforts, he realized there was a niche out there for an organization to advise communities on ways to protect their watersheds. And so the Center was born.

Along the way Schueler has managed to bring those interested, like Kitchell, into the fold, demanding from them a level of multi-tasking that seems to be paralleled only by computer operating systems. “It really takes like three or four years to master all the skills on how to protect and restore watersheds, and we make our employees learn them all,” he says.

Still, while there remains serious work to be done, there’s always a joke within easy reach, says communications director Holland. “We have a good sense of humor here.” She pauses briefly. “We think we’re funny, and that’s what’s important, right?” Right.