In 2023 we have the opportunity to expand our awareness efforts and also the implementation of solutions – impacting more people than ever before, and we are excited to share our plans with you. Following is a brief summary of our 3 major community-facing priorities for 2023.
01
Expanding Rainwater Harvesting Solutions in Rural Communities
One of the core focuses of our work for the past ten years has been on the rural communities of our watershed where the most extreme water conditions are found. Many rural communities in our watershed have access to water only one or two times a week, and, even when they do have access, their water is often contaminated with toxic levels of arsenic and fluoride – the two most prevalent contaminants in our water supplies that are extremely difficult to remove and detrimental to human health.
We will continue mitigating these issues by building an astonishing 350 new rainwater harvesting systems in 2023 through the support of the Gonzalo Río Arronte Foundation, the municipal government of San Diego de la Unión, and the recently-launched Clean Water for Life Campaign – an internal, volunteer-driven initiative, securing funds from a plethora of individual donors in San Miguel and abroad.
02 Scaling Clean Water Access through Our Groundwater Treatment System
At the end of 2022, we won First Prize for the RELX Environmental Challenge – an important international competition held out of England – for our Groundwater Treatment System (GTS). This award gave us not only recognition, but also USD $50,000 in seed funding, to help bring GTS to scale in 2023. We brought our first GTS system online over a year and a half ago, and it’s now fully owned and operated by a group of women from the rural community of Los Ricos. This innovative technology is capable of removing both arsenic and fluoride from groundwater efficiently and economically. In fact, for the same initial cost of installing a one-family rainwater harvesting system, our first GTS is currently serving 40 families, and future systems will be scaled well beyond that.
The success of this award-winning technology, and the innovative approach to community-run operation and management, has inspired multiple stakeholders to get involved, including the State Water Commission of Guanajuato, who are currently verifying the first GTS system for further expansion. We’re now on our way to building 10 more GTS systems in the next five years with our second in 2023 – all in communities with substantially larger populations. This will provide sustainable, safe drinking water to more than 10,000 people. The long-term vision is to make GTS a replicable model that can be built by others to impact the tens of millions of people suffering from arsenic and fluoride contamination across Mexico.
03 Raising Awareness and Building Solutions in Urban San Miguel
Although the rural population is at greater risk, in the urban zone we share the same water, and thus the same threats to both our health and the future of our main water source – our aquifer. Through our Urban Educational Initiative, in 2023, we’ll continue to give private and public talks designed to educate both the public and the authorities of San Miguel about the current state of our watershed, the declining urban water quality, and the different ways to protect our community’s health. Throughout the year, we’ll be hosting, or co-hosting, more than a dozen different public events and actions oriented towards understanding our water situation more deeply and continue to expand our message through social and print media, reaching thousands of people throughout the urban center. As an important event, we’ll be co-hosting, together with other local organizations, a major forum on World Water Day in late March. This event will be an open dialogue between urban residents and local and regional producers, activists, organizations, and other actors working on water and other environmental issues
