Frances Crowe DiDonato will be one of the presenters of the Bioneers Cleveland tour The Perfect Storm: Collaborating on Stormwater to Make Cleveland a Green City on a Blue Lake. The tour will take place Saturday, Oct. 18 from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., guiding participants to a few installation sites of the stormwater collaboration, leading them in a brief discussion about the collaboration, best stormwater techniques and the plans the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) has for a future stormwater utility.

[The following article was compiled from an interview with DiDonato, who will be presenting the tour along with Bobbi Reichtell, Sr. Vice President for Programs, Neighborhood Progress Inc. and Linda Mayer-Mack, Environmental Education Specialist, NEORSD.]

Frances DiDonato works for the City of Cleveland Office of Sustainability, a program within the Department of Public Utilities. Her office looks for ways to save the city money while decreasing its ecological footprint. One of its projects retrofitted building and parking structures in the city with more ecological lighting. The Office of Sustainability also participates in the Great Lakes Energy Development Task Force, a group looking into the viability of harnessing wind energy on Lake Erie.

The three presenters of The Perfect Storm tour represent the NEORSD, Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and the Office of Sustainability, which collaborated recently on a project to build rain barrels for residents participating in the Model Blocks Program, an effort to improve, rehabilitate and revitalize struggling neighborhoods in Cleveland. The city has been supporting these model neighborhoods and would like to see the improvements include sustainability practices.

The rain barrels were constructed by youth from the city’s Youth Employment Program. The young workers made 280 rain barrels that were distributed in the Tremont, Detroit Shoreway, Slavic Village, Glenville, Buckeye, Fairfax, St. Clair-Superior, Ward 5’s Burten, Bell, Carr Development and Kams Corners neighborhoods. Before distributing the rain barrels, the organizers held public meetings and performed outreach in the communities to explain the purpose and value of the barrels. The Perfect Storm program will take participants on a tour of a few of the rain barrel installation sites, ending in Tremont.

Before coming to the Office of Sustainability, Ms. DiDonato worked for two years in the health and environment section of the city law department, participating in legal work for the sustainability department. Her move to the Office of Sustainability was precipitated by a desire to work more on sustainability policy.

For more information about the organizations and programs mentioned in this article, visit the Web sites of Cleveland’s Office of Sustainability, the Cleveland Division of Water, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District and the Model Blocks Program in the Detroit Shoreway and Ward 5 neighborhoods.