Friends of the Reedy River: Alexa Valdovinos ’25 & Kerry Black ’24

Hello from the Reedy River Watershed Conservation Fellows! This is Alexa Valdovinos ’25 and Kerry Black ’24, here to talk to you about what being Fellows with Friends of the Reedy River entails!

Kerry and I do a variety of things on a day-to-day basis from education to helping with grant writing. Each day brings us something new! One of our biggest activities happened during our first week on the team at the 2024 BMW Charity Pro-Am. During this golf tournament, celebrities, amateurs and professionals came together to play at two different country clubs, Thornblade Club and Carolina Country Club.

Although these locations aren’t really in the Reedy River watershed, Friends of the Reedy River was one of the organizations to campaign the sustainability efforts at the tournament alongside other organizations and BMW Charities. The goal was to make the tournament as sustainable as possible. During the tournament, we partnered with Liquid Death water to reduce the amount of plastic used, donated unopened trays of food to Loaves and Fishes, composted and took all waste to be incinerated.

The rest of the summer we’ve been involved with education efforts on social media and in person. Kerry worked on creating mailers to send to residents on the importance of taking care of the Reedy River, and I created a multi-part social media campaign on best management practices. We’ve also traveled to First Baptist Church and AJ Whittenberg Elementary School of Engineering’s summer programs to teach kids about runoff, macroinvertebrate identification and the importance of picking up litter.

Working in this fellowship with Friends of the Reedy River is so important. The Reedy River watershed runs through the ever-growing Greenville County, and its conservation becomes more important each day. It serves people as well as a wide variety of wildlife.

We invite you to learn about the many ways the Reedy River serves Greenville and why it is so important to take care of it. You can also learn specific ways we can all help with its conservation. Please check out the Friends of the Reedy River website here.