Building Resilience to Persevere Through the Next Generation of Chesapeake Challenges

A group of people smile as they talk to each other.

Attendees of the 2025 HBCU/MSI Summit enjoy networking with like-minded peers and conservationists.

Hope – it’s only a four-letter word, but it conjures up big things. And when I think of the needs of our Chesapeake Bay watershed, there are a lot of big things that keep me hopeful.

Hope is the desire for something to happen. We employ hope as a practice of identifying where we are, where we want to be, and the steps needed to get there. Hope is the start of building resilience. The hope of individuals and organizations alike helps fuel this resilience. I see hope as an important characteristic of progress; it’s a key component that drives resilience by motivating individuals to persevere through adversity. Resilience has many synonyms — toughness, strength, durability, give, tenacity, fortitude and grit. It is hope that fuels resilience, and motivates our movement to keep going, because we know our work is for the long haul.

For over five decades, scientists, policy wonks, elected officials, community champions and everyone in between have been focused on solving the problems that challenge the Chesapeake Bay. Since Maryland Senator Mac Mathias chartered the first scientific study on what ails our waters in 1975, our understanding of the Bay’s challenges has only deepened. And in those 50-plus years our collective network of practitioners, problem solvers and watershed champions has grown exponentially. As our knowledge has grown, so has our hope for achieving our goals.

Four people pose for a photo with one of them holding an award plaque

With so many individuals championing clean water in the Chesapeake, the Alliance celebrates those making impacts in their communities at our yearly event, the Taste, like David Wise, our 2025 Fran Flanigan Environmental Leadership awardee.

While I’ve only been involved in this work for the last 23 years, I have to believe that so much of our progress was built on the hope of individuals before me. Since the start of Chesapeake restoration many decades ago, our movement has built resilience in both our ecosystems and human systems. It is the collective hope of our movement that has driven some incredible outcomes, benefiting our Chesapeake communities and their waterways.

Many things keep me up at night, but there are just as many that keep me jumping out of bed in the morning — things happening that point us in the direction of hope for our rivers and streams. Things that remind us that our incredible watershed is truly resilient in the face of present and emerging challenges.

 

Future generations getting involved today

Hope can motivate people to action in their everyday lives.

The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay held its 3rd annual HBCU/MSI Summit this past September, hosting over 90 students and 10 faculty members from universities in Maryland and Washington, DC. These students came together as a community to further their professional development and connect through their love for the environment. Pursuing degrees in an array of academic disciplines, including biology, environmental science, business and creative studies, these students had energy and enthusiasm that was contagious. “This was an enriching and needed experience for me,” one student said. “I had an incredible time being surrounded by like-minded people who provided me with so much insight!”

These students and faculty members left the weekend with new friends, a renewed hope for the Bay’s future and the excitement to dig into this work. Our future generation of Chesapeake champions is already hard at work today.

Four people on stage speaker to a group

HBCU/MSI Summit attendees heard insights from speakers on resilience in the Chesapeake during a panel session.

 

Four Decades of Community Science

Hopes and dreams can drive long-term efforts.

This year, the water quality monitoring program, RiverTrends, is celebrating its 40th anniversary, coinciding with the 10th Anniversary of the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative (CMC). Both of these programs have helped train 800-plus volunteers to collect water quality data, which has resulted in over 1 million data points in one centralized data hub, the Chesapeake Data Explorer. Coming from all seven Chesapeake Bay jurisdictions, this data helps inform educational efforts as well as policy-level decisions. The hard work and hopes of hundreds of individual volunteers have given us long-term data sets, helping monitor and assess our rivers and streams. This collective hope has enabled an all-volunteer effort to become a sustainable solution that gives agency to community members, and a voice to our waterways through science.

a person records data on a clipboard while sitting on a dock

Laura McCann enters data while helping conduct weekly water quality monitoring with the Creekwatchers program on Deep Creek in Seaford, Del. (Photo by Charlie Nick/Chesapeake Bay Program)

 

A vision for the next 15 Years

Hope is something that needs regular attention in order to be renewed and sustained.

In December 2025, the Chesapeake Executive Council approved the revised and updated Chesapeake Watershed Agreement. This is the fourth update of the agreement since the original was signed in 1983. A multi-jurisdictional accord, it sets our sights on the progress we need to make between now and 2040. It sets a vision of “…building a future that is environmentally and economically sustainable, resilient and full of possibility — where everyone can enjoy and help conserve the natural beauty of the Bay, and the lands and waters that surround it, today and for generations to come.” The new agreement continues to focus on the long-term work needed in our watershed, and it is a blueprint for hope and resilience for our next generation of restoration of our rivers and streams.

As we enter our fifth generation of progress towards cleaner rivers and streams in the Chesapeake, we must keep hope and resilience in the forefront of our work. We have so much success to build upon, and so many reasons to remain hopeful for this watershed that 18 million of us call home. When we face the Chesapeake’s challenges head-on, with hope in the forefront of our minds, there is little we can’t achieve. A “hope” mindset will fuel our resilience, because we must keep going.

After all, hope isn’t just another four-letter word.

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