Creeks in Common Launches Collaborative Working Groups to Address Regional Environmental Challenges
Community leaders, industry representatives, educators, researchers, tribal members, and others who care about the region’s urban watershed gathered at Sonoma State University on May 14, 2026 for the third annual Creeks in Common workshop, hosted by the Center for Environmental Inquiry.
Creeks in Common (CiC) is a CEI-run initiative for watershed research & planning. CEI Director Kerry Wininger said Creeks in Common is intentionally interdisciplinary.
“At its core, Creeks in Common is a collaborative initiative centered on Copeland Creek and the broader campus landscape as shared space—shared ecologically, culturally, educationally, and socially,” Wininger said. “It’s an effort to connect teaching, research, stewardship, student learning, community partnership, and place-based engagement through projects grounded in the living systems that run through our campus.”
CEI Program and Outreach Specialist Nicole Myers added, “This initiative allows people to work across silos, the artificial barriers between departments, agencies, and other groups that all have the common goal to support our natural environment in the rapidly changing world.”
The May 2026 workshop showcased student research, highlighted the accomplishments of the Creeks in Common initiative over the past two years, and convened working groups to focus more deeply on specific challenges our region faces.
“Creeks in Common is part of CEI’s Education into Action model—grown from the belief that if we work across boundaries instead of within them, we can create more meaningful learning opportunities for students while contributing to the campus and region,” Wininger said in her remarks.
The working groups are:
- Academic Action: Comprised of CEI partners across campus and focuses on how academic entities can influence, support, and enhance community and regional work.
- Water Resources: Conducts research and inquiry into ways to improve the region’s water health, which is foundational to the health of the region.
- Regenerative Landscaping: Focuses on education about and implementation of riparian projects that regenerate the land via agricultural practices, including restoring soil and water health, supporting biodiversity, and strengthening healthy community-ecosystem relationships through land-based practices, such as restoration, landscaping, and agroecology.
- Human-Nature Connections: Undertakes projects that strengthen linkages among landscapes across the region and the humans, animals, and plant-life that rely on those ecosystems.
- Habitat Awareness: Focuses on facilitating community engagement with the land/water interface, undertaking projects that educate people about the Copeland Creek watershed and connect them to the SSU Native Plant Garden/Campus Nature Corridor and each other.
Working groups include CEI partners such as the City of Rohnert Park, City of Santa Rosa, City of Cotati, Russian River Watershed Association, Sonoma Water, Russian River Confluence, North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, Sonoma Mountain Preservation, local schools, environmental nonprofits, and many others. More than 20 academic and operational departments across campus are also engaged, from Facilities, Center for Community Engagement, and Office of Tribal Relations, to Anthropology, English, Nursing, and SSU’s new Data Science program.
These working groups will meet multiple times over the coming year to collaborate on developing workable solutions to challenges in their area.
Wininger said creeks are an important centerpiece to this work, because “they connect ecology, climate resilience, Indigenous knowledge, infrastructure, psychology, art, planning, public health, engineering, accessibility, storytelling, and community identity.”
Myers added, “just as water is an integral part of Earth’s climate, connecting the atmosphere, biosphere, and geosphere, the Copeland Creek corridor is an integral part of SSU’s campus—connecting faculty, students, and community to our natural environment.”
This year’s gathering celebrated and advanced the work achieved in the first two workshops
“The outcome of Workshop #1 was momentum,” Wininger said. “People saw potential, and we began identifying themes, opportunities, and areas where collaboration could actually happen. Workshop #2 moved us from ideas toward structure. Since then, a major focus of CEI has been helping create the infrastructure to support this effort.”
Workshop #3 established the working groups and convened stakeholders to collaborate.
“Initiatives like this don’t move forward because of a document, a website or even a workshop. They move forward because people decide collaboration is worth their time, creativity, and energy,” said Wininger. “This next phase is where Creeks in Common becomes real. The ideas are important, but the long-term impact comes from sustained relationships and continued collaboration. The Working Groups are how we move from inspiration to implementation—creating projects that students can engage with, that faculty and partners can shape together, and that continue building connections between campus and community over time.”
At next year’s fourth annual Creeks in Common gathering, the working groups will report out on their progress and showcase successes and development.
Learn more at cei.sonoma.edu/CreeksInCommon.
SSU’s Center for Environmental Inquiry is dedicated to environmental research, creative inquiry, and education that directly address environmental challenges of the North Bay. Since its founding in 2007, CEI has worked with regional partners to preserve the planet through outdoor learning at its three preserves, and multidisciplinary real-world projects throughout Sonoma and Mendocino Counties.