Rising Tide Youth Advocacy

Phoebe Skinner

Founder of Rising Tide. A senior at Fox Lane High School in Bedford, New York.

She started this as a youth-led effort to put New York teens in the conversation about the water they will inherit. The tracker is one part of that work — alongside public outreach, advocacy and research.

Our mission

Our mission is to get NY teens informed and talking about sustainable water systems, so we can become advocates to ensure our waterways and water supplies are healthy and plentiful for the future.

We fulfill our mission through public outreach, advocacy and research to engage youth as stakeholders in the future of New York’s water systems.

Why this exists

Decisions about New York’s water — what can be discharged into a river, which wetlands are protected, who pays to replace a lead pipe, how a coastal town prepares for a storm — are made in bills most people never see. Those bills are public. They are also nearly unreadable unless you already know how the Legislature works.

Water policy decided this year sets the conditions of the next fifty. The people with the longest stake in those decisions are usually the least equipped to follow them, not because the information is secret, but because it is written for insiders. Rising Tide exists so New York teens can become those insiders — and then advocates.

What this site does

• Follows every bill in the current New York State session that we identify as water policy, and explains in plain language where each one actually stands.
• Groups bills into topics — drinking water, PFAS, wetlands, flooding, fisheries and more — so you can follow one area at a time.
• Shows the full official history of each bill: who introduced it, which committee has it, what has happened, and how legislators voted where a vote was recorded.
• Lists upcoming hearings, which are usually the first point at which a member of the public can say something on the record.

What this site does not do

It does not tell you what to think about a bill. It does not rate or grade legislators. It does not generate summaries with an AI model, and it does not publish claims it cannot trace to the official record. Where information is missing, the site says so instead of filling the gap.

How to use the tracker

Start with a topic if you know what you care about, or the bill explorer if you want to search. Every view is a plain web address, so any filtered list can be copied, shared or bookmarked. If you want to know how a conclusion on this site was reached, the methodology page explains it in full.

Taking action without an account

Advocacy does not require a platform. Every bill page links to the official state record, names the sponsor and the committee holding it, and lists any scheduled hearing. Public hearings in New York generally accept written testimony, and committee chairs decide which bills get heard at all — which makes contacting them, in your own words, one of the few points where an individual can measurably matter.

Data and credit

Legislative data is provided by LegiScan under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Rising Tide is an independent youth project. It is not affiliated with LegiScan, the New York State Legislature, or any state agency, and it is not the official legislative record.