Adopt a Drain screenshot

The Adopt a Drain Durham program enables Durham residents to “adopt” one of the city’s storm drains or catch basins and pledge to keep it free of leaves, dirt, litter, and other debris. The program helps reduce localized flooding and fosters community engagement by encouraging the public to take an active role in improving their neighborhood.

Code with Durham and other volunteers used a web-based platform called GitHub to develop the open source web application on Ruby on Rails. Github enabled contributors to work on the project from anywhere in the world. They modeled Adopt a Drain Durham on Boston’s Adopt a Hydrant, for which Code for America provided initial development support in 2012.