The mission of Keepers of the Waters is to inspire and promote projects that combine art, science and community involvement to restore, preserve and remediate water sources.

Keepers is at the vanguard of integrated approaches to a vast complexity of water issues through collaborative innovative design, community organizing, mentoring, educating, providing workshops, and functioning as a cross cultural resource.


Who We Are

Keepers of the Waters is directed by environmental artist Betsy Damon (photo on right). She has an MFA from Columbia University and has been an internationally known performance and installation artist. In 1985, while making a paper cast of a dry stone riverbed in Castle Valley, Utah, she decided to devote the rest of her artistic life to water. She founded Keepers of the Waters in 1991 in Minnesota, USA with the support of the Hubert Humphrey Institute. It serves as an international communications network for people actively engaged in projects that transform our relationship to water.

We encourage a variety of projects where we are joined by supporters, co-creators and partners. The web of community expands with each event and project, and our network blossoms. It includes citizens everywhere, landscape designers, water system engineers, artists, filmmakers, municipal staff, organizers, activists and other non-profit organizations. Please join us.


What We Do



Blending these disciplines helps to make the natural process of water treatment both visible and integrated into daily life and culture.

Global water quality is dependent on each community having a sustainable water source that they know about and are responsible for. Cities all over the planet can be filled with vibrant water and art-filled community centers, parks, schoolyards, businesses and backyards that help people become intimately connected to their water sources. These projects will lead the way for fully sustainable water infra-structures, visible and integrated into our everyday lives, rather than hidden under the ground.

When people join together to solve a problem they do better than if they tried to solve it alone. Through water, we are interconnected and related to all other living things. Like water, we are one giant family, always seeking to join one another.