2023 Board of Directors
Sandra Mueller
Francis Ortega
Nancy Lusk
Susan Worthman
George Damon
Craig Handfield
Kira Krenichyn
Larry Rogers
Ingrid Wiegand
Umer Farooq
Shahar Kramer
Who We Are
Keepers of the Waters is a nonprofit organization that encourages art, science and community projects for the understanding and remediation of living water systems. It serves as an international network for people engaged in projects that transform our relationship to water.
Our community expands with each project. It includes landscape designers, water system engineers, artists, filmmakers, municipal staff, organizers, activists, nonprofit organizations and citizens everywhere. Please join us!
Keepers of the Waters is founded and directed by environmental artist Betsy Damon. In 1985, while making a cast of a dry riverbed in Castle Valley, Utah, she decided to devote the rest of her artistic life to water. She started Keepers of the Waters in 1991 with the support of the Hubert Humphrey Institute.
Keepers of the waters is a subordinate organization of the Institute for Releasing Initiative.
What We Do
Keepers of the Waters is at the vanguard of integrated approaches to a vast complexity of water issues. We encourage collaborative design, community organizing, mentorship and education. We provide workshops and function as a cross-cultural resource.
By integrating art, science and community, we aim to make the natural process of water treatment 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 infrastructures that are visible and integrated into our everyday lives.
We solve problems better with a diversity of minds. 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.