[1] Motivated by nuclear power plants around Lake Michigan and threats to Indiana's sand dunes, an editor of Hyde Park Herald and Openlands Project staff member Lee Botts gathered activists from the four-state region at a conference on April 12, 1969.

In 2009, President Barack Obama, who had once represented South Chicago's lakefront district as a state senator, appointed Davis to coordinate federal interdepartmental Great Lakes restoration work.

In 1974, based on Polychlorinated Biphenyls' PCBs' devastating impact in the Great Lakes, the organization led efforts for Congress to ban the chemical through the Toxic Substances Control Act.

[10] In 2002 and again in 2008, the Alliance, under Davis' leadership, helped write and partnered with business interests and other environmental organizations to pass the Great Lakes Legacy Act, funding Area of Concern cleanups.

[11] The Legacy Act became the forerunner to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, demonstrating that multi-sector collaboration and bipartisan political partnerships could successfully secure large-scale congressional appropriations for ecosystem revitalization.

[14] Volunteers collect and use their own data to implement smoking bans at public beaches and inform decisions on microplastics from cosmetics, which have the potential to harm ecosystem health.