OUR IMPACT
35 years in the dirt.
The results of three programs since 1991, each figure helping describe C.R.E.W. commitment
01 THE RECORD
We are deep into our mission
A gift designated to one program goes to that program in full.
Gifts fund the next season of C.R.E.W.
02 FIELD CORPS
C.R.E.W. created the Ojai Valley and Santa Paula Wildfire Safety Program for that work, with funding from CAL FIRE. The crews are paid, and the work is free. Any household in the service area can have its cut brush chipped at the curb, and seniors, veterans, residents with disabilities, and low-income households can have the brush around their homes cleared.
Crews of young people work to create defensible space around their communities
They are the C.R.E.W. Field Corps. It began in 1991 as a trail crew in the Los Padres National Forest and has worked there ever since, restoring damaged trail for recreation and erosion control. Wildfire mitigation came later: cutting fuel breaks, maintaining open space, and clearing defensible space around homes.
Defensible space
The 100 feet around a building where brush and grass are cut back, so a wildfire slows before it reaches the walls and firefighters have room to work. California law requires it in fire hazard zones (Public Resources Code 4291).
BEFORE AND AFTER
FIELD CORPS WORK
03 ONCE UPON A WATERSHED
Lessons in the field introduce students to their local watersheds, starting in transitional kindergarten
Once Upon a Watershed teaches students from transitional kindergarten through seventh grade at 26 schools, and takes the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders out to work in the Ventura River and Santa Clara River watersheds.
- Ventura River
- Santa Clara River
- Matilija Dam
- West Campus Preserve
The students are nine to twelve years old, and the lessons are free to their schools. Since 2005 their lessons have taken place at sites on the Ventura River, from the Ojai Meadows Preserve to the estuary, and in 2025 it opened a sixth, 4.98 acres of wetland at the West Campus Preserve. Success is measured by their experiences.
OUW kids
- act out the plants and animals of their watershed.
- plant acorns toward an oak woodland at the Ojai Meadows Preserve.
- are restoring a wetland and its creek at the West Campus Preserve.
- put native plants back on the steelhead’s riverbank at the Steelhead Preserve.
- stand at Matilija Dam and learn why the steelhead can’t get past it.
- plant native plants and acorns where invasive Arundo was cleared from the river bottom at Willoughby and Big Rock.
- pull trash and microplastics from the Ventura River estuary and test its water.
- tend native gardens, rain gardens and oak nurseries in their own schoolyards.
- catch compost critters in their school compost and look at them under a microscope.
- plant oaks for Oaktober, the oak month Ojai and Ventura proclaimed in 2021.
MATILIJA DAM AWARENESS
David White, Ph.D., the program's director, with a class at Matilija Dam.
C.R.E.W.’s flagship tour, offered by Once Upon a Watershed, takes students to the Matilija Dam to learn about the multifaceted challenges it presents to the watershed and larger ecosystem. Seeing this massive old infrastructure cements for young people the idea that it is obstructive. They see exactly how it is preventing steelhead from reaching their spawning grounds upstream and starving the beaches of sediment.
04 GREEN VALLEY PROJECT
Often a students first experience in civic agency and environmental work
Youth Council members choose an environmental problem in their own town, research it in the field, and present what they find to the people who can permit action on their plan.
In spring 2026, the Green Valley Project’s Ojai Youth Council mapped the city’s heat islands, the spots in town that hold the most heat, and took a plan for 66 trees to the Ojai City Council. The Thousand Oaks Youth Council took its camera-trap survey to the Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency’s partners, and the Oxnard Youth Council studied shorebird habitat on Ormond Beach.
The PAX Environmental Science Institute adds career development in eight fields, and the Communications Internship is paid work for young adults 18 and up.
05 PROJECT ARCHIVE
C.R.E.W. programs have done essential environmental work across Santa Barbara and Ventura counties
All C.R.E.W. programs have projects on this map.
Field Corps crews run the free Ojai Valley and Santa Paula Wildfire Safety Program, cut fuel breaks in the foothills above Ojai, rebuild trails in the Los Padres National Forest, and restore creeks in the Ojai Valley.
Green Valley Project Youth Councils plant oaks and native plant gardens, restore habitat, and survey wildlife in Ojai, Ventura, Oxnard, and Thousand Oaks.
Once Upon a Watershed students plant acorns and native plants at preserves from the Ojai Meadows to the lower Ventura River, and clean and test the water at the river’s estuary.
Numbers match the entries in the Conservation Project Archive. Each marker sits on the site its entry names. A dark circle with a count holds several projects; click it to open them. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
06 CONTEXT