The most long-term, self-sustaining way to provide fish passage for multiple native species and multiple life stages is to remove dams. However, many fish passage practitioners consider dam removal projects to be too difficult due to both design challenges and social issues that can often be contentious. Nevet1heless, more than 880 dams have been removed around the country, and as dams continue to age and deteriorate, opportunities for dam removals have been accelerating. American Rivers has been working for more than a decade to make the dam removal process easier from both technical and policy levels. Based on primary data, American Rivers staff will describe the status of removing dams in the United States, including growth in the overall number of completed projects over time and a summary of project costs we have gathered from cost information on 225 projects. We will describe our roadmap for removing more dams, including brief ideas on leadership, dam safety programs, project management, regulatory clarity, funding and momentum-building. Our role at American Rivers has been as a broker for fish passage, providing whatever is most needed, from active project management to state-level assistance to policy advocacy to project funding. Everywhere that we work, that role has been dependent on critical partnerships with state and federal agencies. We will describe examples of how those partnerships have functioned, including how together we have leveraged technical assistance and project funding. We will show our decision-making process for applying that funding to the most effective fish passage projects, which are more and more turning out to be dam removals.