Nomination Letter from Katie Coffin
for Upstander! Award

I would like to nominate Renata von Tscharner, the President of the Charles River Conservancy, for a Facing History and Ourselves Upstander award. Anyone who has met Renata would agree that she is a charming, brilliant lady whose “nothing is impossible” attitude and love of nature are truly inspiring. I am lucky to work in the same building as this dynamic activist and through a few brief conversations with Renata, I have great respect for her clear intelligence, her contagious joie de vivre and her organization’s admirable mission. I have no doubt her name will go down in history as someone we should thank and admire for her devotion to a wonderful cause: someone who really is making a difference.

With great energy and creative spirit, Renata founded the CRC in 2000, with the mission of protecting and improving the riverside parklands between Watertown and the harbor. This landscape instructor at Harvard’s Radcliffe Seminars was ready to take action: to stop just teaching about the river and start acting and getting others involved in conservancy projects. This Swiss native was trained as an architect and city planner, skills which she has put to use in various cities around the world, but luckily for us, these days, Boston is her home and the Charles River parklands are her playground.

Renata has spear-headed the initiative for a swimmable Charles. Renata does not hesitate to jump in for a swim now and then, which I learned at a CRC presentation given to dispel myths that the river is too polluted for such a thing. Over the past 10 years, the water quality has improved from F- to B+ quality!

The CRC aims to recreate beaches along the Charles, like those found years ago, before people realized that you actually should have gotten a tetanus shot if you fell in the water in those days! Now that the water quality has so improved, Renata hopes to reinvent the Charles so that others find it as inviting as she does, which would boost the quality of life in this city.

Renata cannot do it alone though, so thank goodness she has a way of inspiring and including volunteers—from organizing them to pick up trash to empowering them to speak with government officials. In a very democratic way, Renata inspires donors, politicians, and citizens to take care of our environment.

A particularly interesting outreach effort is the connection between the CRC and local skateboarders. Apparently Renata is known among the skater community as someone who has really listened to find out their needs and wishes, which the CRC will put to use in their creation of a state-of-the-art skate park to be built along the river in East Cambridge. Fueled by ongoing pledges, donations, and grants from the city, the CRC is bound to make a big impact on our awareness of environmental issues, the quality of the Charles River and its parklands, and our recreational abilities in this city.