Paddling Coasts For a Cause-Beachwalkers Traveling the Nation's Beaches and Raising Community Awareness for Everyone's Right to Clean Water.

www.Waterkeeper.org - An environmental advocate, Waterkeeper Alliance has over 200 local Waterkeeper organizations—employing more than 400 full-time and 200 part-time environmental activists, educators, scientists and attorneys. Waterkeeper Alliance is a global movement of on-the-water advocates who patrol and protect over 100,000 miles of rivers, streams and coastlines in North and South America, Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa.

www.WaterAid.org - A humanitarian advocate, WaterAid works in 17 countries enabling the world’s poorest people to gain access to sustainable clean water, sanitation, and hygiene solutions. The World Health Organization reports more than 3.4 million people die each year as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world. Most of the victims are young children, who die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources contaminated by raw sewage.

Both organizations proactively address the human and environmental costs of the global water crisis.

New for 2011 - Beachwalk Project is now working on a Clean Water Education Collaboration between community colleges, state universities and local, grassroots clean water advocates.

More of the story...On June 7th, 2007 Stein Kretsinger, Robert Weinman and Evelyn Weinman completed a five month, 1600 mile voyage between Miami, Florida and Manhattan Island, NY traveling along the Atlantic coast by foot and kayak.

Paddling on the ocean among sharks, dolphins and whales the team worked in cooperation with Waterkeeper Alliance®, to unite coastal communities under the common goal of keeping their regional watersheds clean. The project empowered children and youth as ambassadors to deliver a positive environmental stewardship message to their communities.

Under the name of Beachwalk Project the venture generated national and local media attention for Waterkeeper Alliance® with interviews on: CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS and articles in national publications including: Pacific Daily News, The Chronicle of Philanthropy and Paddler Magazine.

Beachwalk Project has now become a national, clean water awareness project. Following the Atlantic Coast venture the Beachwalk team realized that compromised water quality has both an environmental and humanitarian cost. The Beachwalk team decided to continue a relationship with Waterkeeper Alliance which addresses the Environmental impact of poor watershed stewardship and began to foster a relationship with WaterAid America which addresses the Humanitarian impact of compromised drinking water worldwide.

"Clean Water is essential to the health of every community, especially children." says Evelyn. "The loss of safe recreation and fishing is disturbing enough, but we have realized how important it is to communicate especially to American communities that while clean drinking water is taken for granted here in the states, poor watershed stewardship has cost many communities worldwide their basic need of clean drinking water."

The team is traveling over 6000 miles of coastline in the United States by foot and kayak. Started in February 2007 with the 1600 mile trek up the Atlantic Coast; the project has now paddled Guam (March 2008), and will continue with Oregon Waters: Summit to Sea (June-Sept 2011), Pacific Coast: Seattle to San Diego (July-Sept 2012), the Great Lakes (Summer 2013) and the Gulf Coast (2013).

"This venture is intended to unite communities." says Kretsinger. "We have the unique privilage to share time with members of coastal communities along the entire route and help raise both environmental and humanitarian awareness on a local and national level for Everyone's right to clean water."