Creative Partnerships: Tips for Forging Unlikely Partnerships to Protect Sources of Drinking Water

If you want to be successful in source water protection, you have to collaborate. Collaborating with diverse partners leverages the collective understanding, purpose, and resources needed to produce resilient results.

That’s easy to say—but how is it done? The task of engaging groups with different missions, approaches, and funding sources can feel daunting. This webinar will share examples and detailed strategies for engaging unlikely partners from those who actually do so on a regular basis.

Hear how Source Water Collaborative members Lynn Thorp from Clean Water Action, and Steve Via from American Water Works Association (AWWA) partnered with the Association of Metropolitan Water Administrators (AMWA) and the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP) to make sure EPA heard that the final Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards should not leave water systems to grapple with bromide when a Clean Water Act program could help them avoid Safe Drinking Water Act compliance problems caused by pollution discharges upstream.

Also hear from Jim Capurso, with the U.S. Forest Service, share tips from the Drinking Water Providers Partnership, an effort that facilitates environmental conservation and restoration in municipal watersheds across the Northwest. This partnership includes multiple agencies: USDA Forest Service, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the Washington Department of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the Geos Institute, and WildEarth Guardians.

These source water protection leaders will discuss their experiences with non-traditional partners and share tips on how to select potential partners and establish new partnerships, common barriers encountered and ways to overcome them, and sustaining and expanding partnerships for long-term engagement.

This webinar is the first of the Source Water Collaborative Learning Exchange Webinar Series. The Learning Exchange is an information sharing platform for source water protection advocates to discuss current challenges, share success stories, and transfer knowledge to bolster source water protection efforts across the country.

Register here!