Healthy lands, clear waters: support our work this Giving Tuesday
Healthy lakes start on the land, and we need your help to protect both. Clean Lakes Alliance works year-round to restore prairies, woodlands, shorelines, and parks throughout the Yahara Watershed. When these landscapes thrive, they naturally filter runoff, reduce erosion, and keep pollutants out of our waterways. This year, on December 2nd for Giving Tuesday, we are raising funds to support our Volunteer Day and LakeForecast Water Quality Monitoring programs.
Your gift powers action on the ground
From spring through fall, our Volunteer Day program connects local businesses, organizations, and community members with hands-on restoration projects that directly improve water quality. Volunteers collect native seeds, remove invasive species, clean up beaches, and more! It’s tangible work that strengthens the health of the land and the lakes.
To keep offering meaningful, high-impact volunteer opportunities, we rely on your generosity. Donations to our Volunteer Days Fund support essential tools, supplies, safety equipment, and educational resources that make these projects possible.
- $50 can buy protective gloves for volunteers to use during Volunteer Days
- $100 can purchase additional seed collection bags and weed collection bins
- $250 can purchase tools like garden trowels, loppers, and parsnip predators for native planting and invasive removal projects
- $500 helps us invest in educational tools to help our community engage with science at public events and in the classroom
- $1,000 can purchase t-shirts for hundreds of volunteers
Your gift also fuels water quality monitoring
Clean water starts with good data. Each summer, more than 100 trained volunteers collect critical water quality information such as clarity, temperature, algal blooms, plant debris, and more. The monitors use simple but powerful tools like turbidity tubes and thermometers.
This community science drives lakeforecast.org, our public platform that shares real-time water quality updates from more than 80 lakeside locations. The data helps residents make informed decisions about recreation, while also guiding policymakers and partners working to improve the lakes.
Donations to the LakeForecasting Steward Fund ensure we can train new volunteers, maintain equipment, expand monitoring sites, and continue delivering the trustworthy data our community depends on.
- $100 can purchase a turbidity tube for a LakeForecast volunteer monitor to measure water clarity or a phytoplankton net to enhance enhance ecological investigations and lake-science educational opportunities
- $250 can fund our end-of-the-season volunteer appreciation night to honor the 100+ water quality monitors
- $500 can provide a much-needed digital microscope for educational events and algae identification
- $2,500 can replace a failing, outdated YSI meter and sonde to measure dissolved oxygen and temperature profiles, helping our volunteer monitors better assess changing lake conditions in real time
This Giving Tuesday, your support makes a ripple
By giving to Clean Lakes Alliance, you champion both healthy land and healthy water, fueling on-the-ground stewardship and essential monitoring efforts that protect the lakes we all love.
What is Giving Tuesday?
After Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday was established as a global day of giving in 2012 to encourage people and organizations to donate their time and money to charitable causes.
Improving our lakes and watershed is at the heart of our mission, but we need our community to be a part of the progress. Whether you choose to donate to our Volunteer Days fund, LakeForecast fund, or just want your gift to go to area of greatest need, every drop counts.
By supporting Clean Lakes Alliance this Giving Tuesday, you’re helping us continue to protect and preserve the lakes and waterways of the Yahara Watershed, on land and in the water.
