Pennsylvania Lake Erie Watershed Association was organized in January 2000 by a diverse group of community members in Erie County, PA. It began as an initiative of another local group called the Erie County Environmental Coalition, which was concerned about the health of our local watersheds. A core committee of stakeholders successfullly applied for a Pennsylvania Growing Greener Watershed Grant and obtained $28,000 to form the watershed association now known as PLEWA.

PLEWA helps groups within the greater Lake Erie watershed promote watershed protection and restoration by lending organizational support and project facilitation. PLEWA serves as an information and technical skill clearinghouse in a watershed-wide focus across political boundaries. The organization values environmental research-based standards in measuring progress towards improving Lake Erie water quality.

PLEWA was initiated out of a basic concern for the quality of our water. However, it was soon understood that it is not possible to separate the water from all the other things that are a part of our environment. In fact, PLEWA was able to see water as the common thread to the many diverse issues concerning our environment today, such as: clean air, clean soil, clean water, healthy vegetation, healthy wildlife, and healthy children. Instead of separating our environment into neat little packages, PLEWA embraced all the intricately woven connections and relationships that over and over again lead us back to each other. This holistic approach has more commonly been referred to as the watershed approach.

By using a holistic watershed approach, the diversity of issues is strengthened by the diversity of people who have and who continue to come together to work towards improving them within our watershed. We recognize that each of our individual small sub-watersheds with all their beauty, diversity, blessings, problems, and concerns are the unique pieces that interconnect and make up the larger puzzle that we call Earth. The watershed is the unifying theme behind all of our pieces of concern, bringing us and all of our diversity together. We all live downstream in a small watershed somewhere. And somewhere our small watershed connects into another larger watershed, and then another and another. As we live within our watershed, we are the watershed; and PLEWA will remain dedicated to its, to our, care.