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 178 local programs that protect and monitor watershed quality worldwide.

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.

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

New for 2009 - Beachwalk Project is now working on a Clean Water Education Collaboration between community colleges, state universities and local, grassroots clean water advocates. Visit our page in 2009 to learn more about this new program.

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 4 year, 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 healthy life of every community, especially children. 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. WaterAid is an organization that is working with many other organizations to restore to poor communities worldwide their basic need for clean water through establishing sustainable drinking water resources and providing education on the protection and stewardship of these precious resources."

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 will continue with paddling Guam (March 2008), the Pacific Coast: Seattle to San Diego (July-Sept 2009), the Great Lakes (Summer 2010) and the Gulf Coast (2010).

“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.”