The inaugural Waterfront Alliance Achievement Award was presented at the 2023 Waterfront Conference to former Waterfront Alliance staff member, Sarah Dougherty. Sarah supported the WEDG® (Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines) program at the Waterfront Alliance from 2017–2021, during its critical growth phase.
She was hired as a program associate, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to revise the WEDG Guidelines and transform them from a New York and New Jersey set of guidelines into a nationally applicable standard, along with her colleague and WEDG program manager Kate Boicourt. We recognized Sarah for what is now a nationally known and growing program that is impacting waterfronts from coast to coast.
The WEDG program benefited from Sarah’s strong equity lens and several years of diverse resilience planning experience, ranging from street tree planting with the New York City Parks Departments’ MillionTreesNYC campaign to studying how climate risks like flooding affect women in rapidly growing Indonesian cities.
Shortly after launching the new national WEDG standard, it earned the American Planning Association’s Gold National Achievement award in 2019. One of Sarah’s greatest legacies is transitioning the program into a revenue-generating, equity-centered platform for innovation in resilient coastal design.
To distinguish WEDG from other rating systems and prioritize social equity, Sarah balanced boots-on-the-ground/grassroots engagement with establishing revenue streams for professional and project verifications. She developed and helped teach the first-ever two-day WEDG Professionals’ training, exam, and credentialing system. She oversaw the first national project verification of North Waterfront Park in Wilmington, North Carolina. Finally, Sarah helped shape WEDG’s corporate strategy, developing inroads into ESG, green finance, and sustainable real estate to increase the widespread adoption of WEDG principles.
WEDG would not be what it is today without Sarah. We are deeply grateful to her for her commitment, time, talent, and values which helped establish a program unlike any other in the country. For this, we honor Sarah with our first ever Waterfront Alliance Achievement Award.
