What Are Multi-Benefit Projects?
These are river/watershed protection, conservation, and enhancement projects with beneficial outcomes for multiple water use interests (agriculture, municipal, recreational, environmental).
These projects involve many steps: pre-planning, stakeholder engagement, and project design and permitting. Once these steps are underway, the next steps include project implementation, monitoring, and maintenance.
Foundational to successful implementation of this “project life cycle” is strong organizational capacity combined with project coordination capacity (Figure 1). Strong organizational capacity is characterized by:
- Clear mission and goals,
- Supportive board of directors,
- Knowledgeable and trusted staff, and
- Financial empowerment/stability.
Project coordination capacity refers to the specific capacity needs for managing and implementing multi-benefit projects. Project coordination builds on strong organizational capacity and includes capacity for project management, stakeholder coordination, relationship building, collaboration, fundraising (e.g., grant writing), grant reporting, communications, education, and outreach.
