Chesapeake grant to allow at-risk students to create water-quality program

Boiling Springs, Pa. (Friday December 2, 2016)

 

Diakon Youth Services has received a $4,990 grant pledge from the Chesapeake Bay Trust to support water-quality initiatives at the Diakon Wilderness Center in support of the bay.

“This is the first restoration-focused grant we’ve received from the trust,” says Jason Brode, who oversees the wilderness center, “which has twice funded field trips to bay educational centers for students served by the Center Point Day Program.” The program serves youths from Dauphin, Cumberland, Perry, Franklin, Adams, York and surrounding counties.

The grant will allow 25 students to participate in an environmental-education project designed and overseen by Kim Patten, who manages the wilderness center’s greenhouse and native plant nursery, used for student vocational training. The project will include investigation of the problem of storm-water runoff, an audit of storm-water at the center and the installation of several cisterns to capture rain from the 15,000-square-foot greenhouse roof.

“This resource will provide irrigation for the nursery and lessen, by many thousands of gallons, the storm-water impact on the small tributary of the Yellow Breeches Creek on the wilderness center campus,” says Patten. The grant also will make available a free public workshop on rain-barrel installation for homeowners, she adds. The event will held at the Wilderness Greenhouse in the spring.

Center Point is a day treatment program that features individualized programming for students who struggle in a traditional school environment.


For further information, please contact:
William Swanger, M.A., APR
Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications
Diakon Lutheran Social Ministries
(717) 795-0308
E-mail: swangerb@diakon.org