Tampa Bay Water Blog

Tampa Bay Water awarded nearly $30,000 in mini-grant at its February board meeting to help area non-profits, schools and community groups protect the aquifer, rivers and bay that the region uses for its drinking water.  This year, Tampa Bay Water received six mini-grant applications and was able to fully fund four of the applications, including:

• Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful: $10,000 mini-grant to support education initiatives and presentations to school groups and community groups through its Environmental Education Program. The program teaches students the importance of putting waste in its place and how their actions can directly affect the Tampa Bay watershed.
• Keep Pinellas Beautiful: $10,000 mini-grant to increase its K-12 educational curriculum on watershed health, water quality, source water health and habitat improvement. It also will expand its Annual Student Summer Workshops to include watershed stewardship education across Pinellas County and grow its Youth Advisory Council.
• Pasco Education Foundation: $5,000 mini-grant to help launch Wendell Krinn Technical High School’s aquaponics farming system. Named in honor of Ridgewood High School’s first principal, the school provides students the opportunity to graduate high school while earning a technical certification. The project will bring together a multidisciplinary team of students to build, operate and maintain a system that uses 90 percent less water than traditional farming and will eliminate agricultural runoff.
• Mr. Anthony Leotta, a teacher at Sickles High School: $2,000 mini-grant to relocate and expand the school’s hydroponics garden to make it more accessible as a teaching tool and increase its yield while reducing water consumption. The new hydroponic system will allow the students to learn to grow food more efficiently, using approximately half the amount of water to grow eight times the number of plants that a traditional garden would yield without any agricultural runoff.

Since 2008, Tampa Bay Water has invested approximately $200,000 in its mini-grant program to help community-based efforts that protect the region’s drinking water resources. For more information and to apply for future grant funding, click here.