Impact

With 40 years of on-the-ground experience, The Freshwater Trust is the largest restoration-focused organization in the Pacific Northwest, and the second largest conservation group based in Oregon.

“Quantified conservation” is an approach that allows us to ensure our actions are translating to outcomes. We still count the number of trees we planted alongside a river, but then we take it a step further and use technology to identify how much solar energy will be blocked by those trees, keeping the water cool, or how much runoff is absorbed by the trees, keeping the water clean. We employ tools that tell us how and where a conservation project will have the largest overall benefit for a watershed.

Quantifying the outcomes of conservation also allows us to integrate the economy with the environment. It turns conservation into a sound investment opportunity, allowing investors to target river projects with the greatest impact and grant funders to purchase actual outcomes.

We don’t buy into the notion that more is better. For us, better is better, and we track how every action we take is making a difference for our freshwater resources, our wildlife and our communities.

Ensuring a future with clean, healthy rivers requires understanding the outcomes of our actions and staying adamant about achieving results.

Where We Work

Dive deeper into our areas of focus.

Our annual Uplift Report summarizes the powerful outcomes of our projects. What’s included is the result of diligent monitoring, the development of new systems for efficient data collection, and the deployment of tools and methods that ensure our work is strategic, effective, and results in measurable “uplift.” See our impact by exploring the interactive display of all our uplift data.

Explore the Data

Transparency. For decades, the restoration and conservation sectors have operated without transparency — tools that identify the best places to work, reporting on returns, and monitoring to guarantee outcomes. The Freshwater Trust puts coordinated action, analytics, and rapid funding for outcomes to work on behalf of river basins across the West. Our new approach, which has transparency at its heart, was born out of recognizing that the actions taken and the dollars spent havenʼt worked. Getting honest about the urgency of this moment has inspired our innovation.

Read More

Get In Touch

Have questions about our results?
David Primozich, Vice President - Water

Contact David
Card image cap
Contact Me At

Portland (Main Office), OR
503-222-9091 ext. 19
Email David