The History of Genesee Green

By the end of the 1980's at the University of Michigan, Dr. William Stapp and one of his assistants, Mark Mitchell, had developed a program called Global Rivers Environmental Educational Network or GREEN for short. The vision of the program was to teach students the protocols of water quality monitoring, have the students monitor a stream, and share their data across the internet with other students doing the same thing at distant locations. It was believed that those learned skills would help maintain and improve the water quality worldwide.

Project Green is based on nine protocols selected by the National Sanitary Foundation. Those nine tests would result in a numerical water quality index (WQI) that could be used to compare water quality from river to river and year to year.

In 1990, the Flint Community Schools were offered an opportunity to participate in Project Green through a grant from General Motors. Five Flint teachers volunteered. By 1994 it was realized that General Motors was more than just Flint so suburban schools were invited to join the program. Today any instructor in Genesee County teaching a science class 8-12 can participate if supplies are available.

Project Green, now referred to as Genesee GREEN, has grown in Genesee County from approximately 100 students in 1990 to an excess of 1200 in 2004. The ideal is that all of the students converge on specific sampling sites along the Flint River Watershed on the same day to conduct a WQI analysis. The data gives a snapshot of that moment in time. As each year is added, comparisons can be made about the quality of the water running through the watershed environment based on time.

At this time, the Flint River Watershed Coalition is the fiduciary agent for Genesee GREEN with grant sponsors through out the county.