We catalyze community water projects
Reflo volunteers pose by the underground cistern at Cream City Farms, an innovative rainwater harvesting project Reflo supported in Milwaukee’s 30th Street Corridor.
The environmental nonprofit community in Milwaukee is crowded, but Reflo serves a vital niche. Reflo is a project catalyst with a successful engagement process that works hand-in-hand with problem-solving engineering to create bigger, better water projects that serve communities.
In 2010—the year torrential summer rains pummeled the Brew City at the same time a burgeoning urban gardens community faced the cutoff of municipal hydrants for irrigation—a young engineer saw an opportunity for servant leadership to make a real difference.
Justin Hegarty, who co-founded a chapter of Engineers Without Borders while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, realized that traveling to Guatemala wasn’t the only way to help build a better world.
After a decade in the private sector, Justin co-founded a nonprofit environmental engineering organization, Reflo (prounounced RE-flow), to be the change in Milwaukee—a city facing socioeconomic and racial challenges but also rallying together as the water-centric anchor of America’s Third Coast.
Solving critical urban water issues while teaching the next generation STEAM
Since 2013, Reflo has grown quietly and organically with no start-up funding, no mandate from political or funding sources, no model to guide its path forward—just a desire to solve critical urban water issues with a focus on community and education, and a team that knows how to move projects forward while building trust and buy-in from partners. Those who benefit directly from Reflo’s work are the organization’s strongest partners.
Rainwater harvesting pavilion at the Guest House Milwaukee men’s homeless shelter. Reflo supported design and construction of this award-winning project, in addition to influencing the municipal policy framework to allow for free-standing structures to support urban agriculture.
The first issue Reflo tackled was a complex hurdle at the intersection of sustainability, municipal policy, and urban equity. Thriving urban gardens were popping up in food desert neighborhoods across Milwaukee. But they were becoming dependent on fire hydrants to irrigate locally grown vegetables. When municipal policy phased out hydrants as a water source, Reflo leveraged its rainwater harvesting engineering expertise to support Milwaukee’s urban farmers by taking a lesson from its Engineers Without Borders experience serving water-scarce rural Guatemala. Partnering with the City of Milwaukee, Reflo advocated to update municipal ordinances to allow for freestanding rainwater harvesting structures, then helped build an award-winning pavilion at the Guest House Milwaukee, an inner city men’s homeless shelter paired with an urban farm.
To massage the metaphor, re-using rainwater this way “feeds two birds with one hand,” providing an independent water source for gardeners and diverting stormwater from streets and sewers.
Working with myriad partners and respecting their diverse perspectives, Reflo continued to brainstorm innovative ways to capture rainwater for urban gardens and farms. At Cream City Farms, a remediated brownfield property in the city’s 30th Street Corridor, water is filtered through a bioswale that then diverts it into an underground cistern assembled by community volunteers, and drawn via solar pump to irrigate lines of crops that support a local CSA.
That solution turned out to be part of the answer for a larger critical urban water issue: managing the hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater runoff at Milwaukee’s schoolyards. Decades ago, school properties were paved with asphalt to reduce lawn maintenance costs. But over time stormwater cascading from the cumulative acres of impervious asphalt into sewer systems overwhelms the systems, leading to overflows and flooded neighborhood basements, as well as polluting our rivers and Lake Michigan with human waste and stormwater runoff.
A student from Escuela Vieau, one of the first schools Reflo supported through the Green & Healthy Schools program, examines a plant at Paliafito Eco-Arts Park in Walker’s Point as part of a field trip Reflo organized.
Milwaukee Public Schools comprises 154 schools with more asphalt than any other landowner within the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) sewer service area. In those schools are more than 75,000 children of all ages who tend to spend more time focused on electronic devices than making up games to play outside with their friends in a safe, creative environment.
Working with multiple public partners, Reflo helped “green” urban schoolyards with cisterns and bioswales to manage stormwater while creating a better place for students to learn about science, technology, engineering, art, and math.
If Reflo’s work were just about engineering—managing stormwater by replacing asphalt with ecosystems that incorporate and mimic nature—we wouldn’t bring school teachers, staff, parents, students and community partners together in a shared decision-making process that creates positive, sustainable change in neighborhoods. We want to inspire children to explore, experiment, and use their imaginations through nature, and help them be the next generation of environmental stewards and engineers.
Reimagining where and how kids learn and play
Green infrastructure is a combination of bioswales, cisterns, and porous hard surfaces that capture rain where it falls and slows its flow to allow it to filter into the ground. It prevents runoff that pollutes rivers and lakes. The structures also mimic the natural function of forests and fields that cities replaced with buildings, streets, and hard surfaces, leaving water with nowhere to go.
Through the Green and Healthy Schools Program, Reflo works with Milwaukee schools to replace problematic schoolyard asphalt with green infrastructure—vibrant, nature-inspired landscapes that capture stormwater and reduce neighborhood flooding, increase urban biodiversity with trees and plants, and nurture students’ curiosity while teaching them how to think critically, and how to work together creatively in green, healthy spaces. What is created through engineering is more than just water management; it’s captivating and beautiful. Being in nature inspires peace and calm, increasing positive behavior in the classroom. Beyond these schoolyards are neighborhoods that struggle with crime and the daily challenges of just making ends meet.
Reimagining asphalt schoolyards begins with schools applying for conceptual planning support by Reflo and MMSD. Schools are selected based on need and the enthusiasm they express in their application and in-person “pitch” to a Green Schools Consortium of Milwaukee committee. Five schools receive a planning grant each year to start the planning process, which involves the school community, administration, and project partners. Reflo works with the schools to conceptualize what teachers, staff, students and parents agree is most beneficial. After a year of planning comes at least one year of fundraising by the schools and project partners. School districts then hire engineering consultants through competitive bidding to create the detailed designs. Construction of new green infrastructure starts the summer of the third year. Reflo’s team continues to be involved in helping teachers make curriculum connections, maintenance, professional development, and in adding amenities such as Outdoor Discovery Carts and picnic tables.
A growing body of research suggests children with access to green schoolyards have better academic outcomes, increased engagement and enthusiasm, improved social-emotional skills, and are more active. STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) connections are easy to make through nature. Reflo has an ongoing partnership with Arts @ Large to help teach children about the environment and nature through art—fully engaging their imaginations, and using creative visuals to help explain complex science concepts.
“If Reflo’s work were just about engineering—managing stormwater by replacing asphalt with ecosystems that incorporate and mimic nature—we wouldn’t bring school teachers, staff, parents, students and community partners together in a shared decision-making process that creates positive, sustainable change in neighborhoods. We want to inspire children to explore, experiment, and use their imaginations through nature, and help them be the next generation of environmental stewards and engineers.”
To support outdoor learning and activities at green and healthy schoolyards, Reflo developed the Outdoor Discovery Cart (provisional patent) to support teachers in the field. It’s jam-packed with modular resources and durable to take all the outdoor loving dozens of students can provide.
The Bay View Montessori schoolyard shown before and after the Reflo-catalyzed transformation to a Green & Healthy School. Reflo supports over 20 schools through the process, five per year. While asphalt removal and stormwater management are priorities, the design is informed by teachers, students, administrators, community members, and others on each school’s “Green Team,” who also play a role in fundraising by sharing the school’s story. Implementation is supported by various funders, MPS staff, Reflo, and local contractors gaining valuable experience in green infrastructure construction.
Serving neighborhoods through water projects that unite
Reflo led a community cistern build day at Alice’s Garden to construct an underground cistern that accepts water routed from the adjacent Brown Street Academy schoolyard via a bioswale. Reflo worked with local contractors from Walnut Way to build local experience in “blue/green jobs.” It’s an example of both project and process. Reflo is conscious about both.
Through our Rainwater Harvesting for Urban Agriculture Program, Reflo works with residents of historically marginalized neighborhoods to capture rainwater so urban gardens overflow with healthy vegetables for family tables—a counter-balance to readily available, affordable junk food at neighborhood stores.
A Reflo project at Alice’s Garden—one of the largest community-supported gardens in Milwaukee that engages in equity, spirituality and community building—tapped the Green and Healthy Schools program model by diverting stormwater runoff from an asphalt schoolyard of an adjacent Milwaukee Public School into a bioswale, and then into an underground cistern so gardeners could use a new solar panel powered pump and filtration system to water their crops.
Building a 7,000-gallon cistern together with community volunteers beneath Paliafito Eco-Arts Park in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood.
Through our Innovative Placemaking Program, Reflo thinks outside the box to help neighborhoods create meaningful spaces beyond schoolyards and urban gardens to enhance daily urban life.
Of course, collecting and managing rainwater is part of these projects. The more vexing the challenge, the more opportunity there is for innovation through intentional community collaboration and creative problem-solving. Take Paliafito Eco-Arts Park, for example, in a residential neighborhood northwest of the Allen-Bradley Clock Tower. Reflo worked with Arts @ Large and Walker’s Point stakeholders to redesign a pocket park. The neighborhood now has raised garden beds and a performance space. A 7,000-gallon underground cistern designed to catch up to 90% of stormwater runoff from the area provides water for the gardens while reducing neighborhood flooding and sewage flow into Lake Michigan. The “eco-arts” park hosts yoga, youth-driven theatrical productions and free summer music.
Then there’s Green Tech Station. A one-of-a-kind green infrastructure research and demonstration site is a jewel in the rough of Milwaukee’s 30th Street Corridor, where industry uprooted leaving scars both visible and invisible. To help heal the wound, many partners have come together, with water proving a unifying element. Reflo played an instrumental role in converting the all-but-forgotten former brownfield into a community asset.
In 2021, Green Tech Station soft-opened after more than three years of design, remediation, planning, planting, and construction. It offers an outdoor classroom with shade pavilion, shipping container, a green infrastructure test plaza, twin bioswales, underground cistern, constructed wetland, native prairie plantings, contemplative walking paths, water research projects, art-infused benches, signage made of 12,000 recycled bottlecaps, and hundreds of trees.
Mentoring through sustainability, environmental education, problem-solving, and storytelling
Through our evolving Environmental Internship Program, Reflo hires high school students each year for hands-on learning with tradespeople and content experts. This exposes them to careers in woodworking, construction, design, engineering, policy, communications, and environmental education. They can start in high school, over the summer, or after graduation. They learn about green infrastructure and construction by doing it, and they learn how to communicate its value through storytelling. They participate in workshops and community events. Students create projects using multiple woodworking tools and equipment to support Reflo’s programming, and receive their 10-hour OSHA certification.
Reflo interns helped design, build and manage green infrastructure, and create educational exhibits and signage. They also helped build Reflo’s Virtual Water Table—an augmented reality sandbox and a digital role-playing game that Reflo takes to community events and schools to teach about water, and how it flows through where we live, work and play.
In addition to designing projects, Reflo is always looking for ways to teach and engage the community in learning more about water’s role in the environment, and water-related issues that communities must tackle together. Technology can help make learning more fun and creative through tactile, sensory, exploratory, immersive, and engaging play. This problem-solving internship program is one of Milwaukee Public Schools’ “Alternative Placement Sites” for student employment opportunities.
Miranda, Water Storyteller of the Milwaukee Community Map, narrates short videos that orient folks old and young to our watersheds, the history of our relationship to water, and the work of community groups and others working to make a difference through green infrastructure and water-quality projects.
The Milwaukee Water Stories Program ties together Reflo’s mission-driven work and helps Milwaukee residents of all ages understand water as a valuable resource through technology and storytelling. This work both supports Reflo’s projects and stands alone as part of ongoing community engagement. It is accomplished through three digital components: a map, an app, and a game, plus a Virtual Water Table we take into the community. The Virtual Water Table taps science and social studies. It showcases the Milwaukee Community Map in Google Earth and our MKE Waterscape role-playing game.
Reflo is actively compiling public and private data and stories that can be used to explore and promote project collaboration among community groups. In 2020, the Port Exploreum maritime museum in Port Washington commissioned Reflo to build its own Virtual Water table as a permanent museum exhibit. The Milwaukee Water Stories program also supports the citywide WaterMarks initiative, with Reflo collecting and creating web video interview content of local water “Voices” in a way that supports artists and community organizers who engage non-technical audiences. Sharing stories in new and compelling ways is ultimately about building up a public “Water Chorus” to advance the work started by the energetic bundle of water-focused nonprofit, public, and private entities comprising Milwaukee’s “Water Choir.”
As part of the Milwaukee Water Stories program, in 2021 Reflo convened community stakeholders to envision what a water-centric Milwaukee could look like in 2071 if we come together to collaborate in the face of climate change. Working with UW-Milwaukee Community Design Solutions, the result was three future aspirational visualizations to help support present-day efforts that rally us around water by provoking the public imagination around actionably optimistic transformation.
What does a better Milwaukee look like?
In less than a decade, Reflo has played a key role in making more than 35 projects happen. These projects both beautify Milwaukee and educate children and adults about water as a valuable resource, while diverting a million gallons of rainwater from the sewer system each time it rains to reduce the risk of flooding and improve Milwaukee’s stormwater management.
A web map of Green & Healthy Schools across the MPS district.
Twenty-eight schoolyards are at various phases of transformation—from conceptual planning to fundraising, detailed design work, construction, and maintenance and stewardship. As of autumn 2021, the equivalent of roughly three city blocks of deteriorating, impervious asphalt has been removed from schoolyards and replaced with living, teaching ecosystems that inspire children while diverting from storm sewers some 780,000 gallons of rainwater per rain event. The water instead flows into cisterns beneath porous surfaces and bioswales that soak up water like sponges. Reflo was the catalyst that made it happen, effectively scaling a successful pilot at two schools to 26—and counting.
A team that is led by an engineer knows how to make all the “LEGOS” fit together. Reflo has developed an expertise in scaling projects with community voices and collaboration at the heart of each one. We are well positioned to do the work for infrastructure investment in historically marginalized communities—an opportunity to leverage public funding opportunities.
“A team that is led by an engineer knows how to make all the “LEGOS” fit together. Reflo has developed an expertise in scaling projects with community voices and collaboration at the heart of each one. We are well positioned to do the work for infrastructure investment in historically marginalized communities—an opportunity to leverage public funding opportunities.”
A case in value: Starms Early Childhood Center
Frances Starms Early Childhood Center is located in a Milwaukee neighborhood prone to flooding. Stormwater used to run off the school’s asphalt into a storm drain in the center of the schoolyard, and back up into the school’s basement. Children didn’t like to play on the asphalt, but they did like to gather around the storm drain after it rained. They expected to see alligators swimming in the sewer.
Then the school met Justin Hegarty and the Reflo team.
When Starms was chosen as one of five schools to make up the first cohort of Green and Healthy Schools projects, the centerpiece of the plan was to reduce the playground asphalt by 80%, and replace it with a large, permeable rubber play surface in the shape of Lake Michigan. They created place-based art. Each major city around the Great Lake has a marker, and the play equipment on the western edge includes three slides that empty onto the Lake Michigan play surface. Each slide represents a major river in Milwaukee.
Lake Michigan inspired the porous play surface at Starms Early Childhood Academy. Water infiltrates beneath the surface, which is good for the environment. Aboveground, kids play and learn in a safer place that connects their development to our water resources.
Children can pretend to row a boat across the lake—the surface has row boats attached. They can “flow” into the lake via the Milwaukee, Kinnickinnic, or Menomonee River. Nearby, a Music Play Balance Walk is designed for students to play with secured musical instruments on a stage surrounded by natural log seating that doubles as a balance beam. “I can teach outside all day—math, writing, literature, drawing—better than I can inside. We have four-year-old children who try to swipe a book like a tablet and don’t know what to do with a crayon. There are so many curriculum connections in nature,” said Lisa Misky, a K4 teacher at Starms.
On a field trip supported by Reflo, Starms’ Lisa Misky takes her class to Lake Michigan to connect what they see every day on the schoolyard with the reality that Milwaukee exists on the shore of Lake Michigan. It’s a connection too many kids raised just miles away miss. Reflo’s work is reconnecting our next generation with water, cultivating citizen-stewards well prepared to appreciate and care for each other and our marvelously interconnected world.
The school uses mindfulness to help children regulate their feelings and emotions. In a relaxed outdoor classroom environment, children can play to learn. Children needing to interact and “do” in order to learn has been the school’s teaching model for over 30 years.
“When we come in from nature time, they are calm; less stressed. It’s a great break for mental health. You’re calmer and less stressed when your hands are in the soil or doing purposeful, positive activities,” said Misky, who co-chairs the school’s Green and Healthy Schools Committee.
In the summer, Misky leads a Weeding Wednesdays group that includes school parents, neighbors and volunteers. They are summer stewards, tending this magical space for the next school year’s learning adventures.
—Anne Summers & Karen Herzog, August 2021
Editing by Michael Timm, September 2021