PRIORITIES

Below you will find a list of our current priorities. These may shift over time as the landscape evolves.

Our goals are to provide food, shelter and habitat for the lake's wildlife residents by bringing back absent native species and protecting wildlife residents as best we can from violence and pollution. We also aim to rewild and reconnect fragmented wildlife corridors at the lake and along the Minnehaha Creek to the Mississippi River. We seek to strengthen our human community by providing an opportunity to engage in meaningful and restorative healing work and by providing healthy, natural spaces for humans to interface with nature, grow resilience, improve mental health, and restore Native medicines. We work to strengthen our connections to and involvement of Native communities with the long term and fantastical goal of restoring historic bison migration corridors from South Dakota to the lake along the Minnesota River.

We don’t use pesticides, don’t introduction of nonnative species, don’t use neonictinoids, and work with kindness. We currently have permission to work in the "owl forest," the Delta, and the space between the bike path and the lake shore on the south side of the lake. We also do some work around the whole shore of Lake Hiawatha, working on aggressive nonnative species removal, such as buckthorn and yellow iris.

  • A rich and diverse community of wildlife calls Lake Hiawatha home. Any use of the Land should include protection and preservation of the areas where existing wildlife populations reside, including generous buffer zones to limit intrusion into vital habitat areas. 

  • We support the increase of habitat zones by increasing the ecological diversity of the land surrounding Lake Hiawatha. We want to see more biodiversity, climate resilience and flood storage capacity.

  • The timely, comprehensive and effective mitigation of the “north pipe” storm sewer system as defined in previous planning discussions by the MPRB as the “open channel” option. Lake Hiawatha receives tons of trash and myriad pollutants that dump directly into the Lake via the north pipe storm sewer. This pollution severely impacts the water quality and ecological health of the Lake and its habitat. Given the scale of this particular urban sub-watershed, it is essential that an effective mitigation system be installed at the end of the line without delay, and should be a given in any public use scenario going forward.

  • Friends of Lake Hiawatha works and advocates for the reduction of phosphorus production. To lower phosphorous in our water, we need increased storm water treatment, golf course pumping reductions, and wetland restoration.