The latest news, events, and updates from

Charles River Watershed Association.

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Meet Our Newly Elected Board Members!

Last week, more than 100 CRWA members and partners gathered at the MIT Welcome Center for CRWA’s 59th Annual Meeting. We enjoyed food, drinks, music, and conversation while celebrating progress toward a clean, resilient Charles River in 2024. We honored the contributions of the dedicated donors, volunteers, advocates, and environmental leaders who make our work possible and voted to elect board members and officers. A special congratulations to Paul Levy, who was elected as CRWA’s new Board President. Over a long career, Paul has served in numerous leadership positions, including Executive Director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) where he had primary responsibility for the “Boston Harbor Cleanup,” one of the largest pollution control projects in the world, which led to significant cleanup of the Charles River.

Susie Klein is an avid sailor and rower, spending half her time on the Charles River during the warmer months. With a diverse career spanning media, public and investor relations, and academia, she is the former president of the Boston chapter of the National Investor Relations Institute. Now retired, Susie serves on the board of Framingham Adult ESL. Among her many accomplishments, Susie sailed from Boston to Turkey in 2005-06 with her husband and their teenage children aboard a 40-foot sailboat. She also led her men’s crew to a first-place finish in her division as the coxswain at the 2019 Head of the Charles Regatta.

Claire White has a strong commitment to community service and youth engagement. A pediatric orthopedist at Boston Children’s Hospital, she founded the “Mad Scientist Club” at the James Hennigan After-School Program. She later chaired the Committee Overseeing Volunteer Services at Yale School of Medicine. Outside of her clinical work, Claire is a volunteer monthly monitor with CRWA, advises the Healthcare Professions course at Brookline High School, and volunteers with local rowing teams and community organizations.

Jane Wiseman leads the Institute for Excellence in Government, a non-profit consulting firm dedicated to improving government performance. She is also an Innovations in American Government Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Jane has served as Assistant Secretary, Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety, and as Assistant to the Director for Strategic Planning, National Institute of Justice, United States Department of Justice. Jane represented the Justice Department on detail as a Staff Assistant for the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

We are grateful to the awardees, new, returning, and outgoing board members, and dedicated watershed community members, as well as our sponsor, MIT, for joining us. 

CRWA In The News:

Letter to the editor: A Swimmable Charles River? Yes, We Can! 

“Forty years after the cleanup of the Charles River began, we still cannot safely swim in its waters. The only swimming that takes place in the Charles’ “Lower Basin”—i.e., the area between Watertown and Boston Harbor—is via special permit, and those events are frequently canceled due to poor water quality. But now we have an opportunity to change that.”

Read more in the Waltham Times, Lincoln Squirrel, Fig City News, Natick Report, Holliston Reporter, Westwood Minute, HopNews, Lexington Observer, and Boston Sun.

Speak Directly With Officials About Their Plans to Eliminate CSOs!

The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) and the cities of Cambridge and Somerville are holding a listening session from 6 pm to 8 pm on Thursday, April 3, to hear public opinion on their efforts to address Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) in the Charles River. If you care about stopping raw sewage from ending up in the river, we urge you to make your voice heard on April 3!

Community-Led Restoration in Action: Muddy River Workshop

On a sunny Sunday morning, over 50 community members gathered at the Brookline Village Public Library for a Muddy River Vision Workshop. This event, which CRWA organized in collaboration with the Emerald Necklace Conservancy (ENC) and the Consensus Building Institute (CBI), provided an opportunity for residents from Boston, Brookline, and Newton to share valuable insights on potential restoration projects aimed at improving water quality and enhancing climate resilience in the Muddy River watershed.

Check Out Our Newest Annual Water Quality Report!

Each year, our science team analyzes and interprets data collected in our four core sampling programs – Volunteer Monthly Monitors, Flagging Program, Cyanobacteria Monitoring, and Biological Monitoring – to understand trends in water quality and assess ecosystem health. The findings of our Annual Water Quality Report help us to advocate for solutions to restore the river’s ecosystem and build climate resilience. We’ve finished analyzing 2024 data and have compiled it here:

Charles River Watershed Enters Month 6 of Drought

The Mass. Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs declared a drought across the state in October 2024. Fast forward to March 2025 and drought conditions remain dire. Despite the winter’s multiple snowstorms and spring rains, most of the state remains in a critical drought, including the entirety of the Charles River watershed. Unfortunately, the precipitation we've received since October has been insufficient to restore groundwater levels to normal.

New EPA Permitting Program will Reduce Stormwater Pollution in the Charles and other Boston-area Rivers

CRWA submitted comments this month in support of U.S. EPA’s new stormwater permitting program for private commercial, industrial, and institutional properties with an acre or more of impervious cover in the Charles, Mystic, and Neponset River watersheds. For years, CRWA, along with our partners at Conservation Law Foundation, have been urging EPA to develop this permitting program, which will play a key role in cleaning up stormwater pollution and improving water quality in the Charles. This common sense approach, which assigns responsibility based on contribution to the overall problem, will also result in significant cost savings for our local communities who are currently on the hook for major stormwater pollution reductions.

Featured Photo

This skunk cabbage spotted in Sherborn is one of the first tell-tale signs of spring!

📷: Carly Sherman

⭐️ Gratitude Spotlight ⭐️

Thank you to the Gordon and Marjorie Osborne Foundation for their $50,000 grant supporting CRWA’s Cut the Crap Campaign. This funding comes at a critical time with the recent MWRA proposal that would greatly reduce CSOs and the expansion of this campaign in the Summer of this year. 

Thank you to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for their support of invasive plant management in the Charles River. With the nearly $60,000 this grant provides, we will be able to continue this work engaging the community in habitat restoration and developing plans for sustained invasive plant management.