Community-led Groundwater Stewardship and Safe Drinking Water Solutions in California Rural Low-Income Communities
Every year, more than one million Californians face unsafe drinking water from taps in their homes, schools, churches, parks, and community centers. Research by Switzer Fellows Carolina Balazs and Rachel Morello-Frosch has found that water systems in predominantly Latino and low-income communities are affected by disproportionately higher levels of arsenic and nitrate contamination.
With support from a Switzer Leadership Grant, Community Water Center (CWC) has hired 2023 Switzer Fellow Vida Sánchez as Community Solutions Strategist in order to further their mission that all California communities have access to clean and safe water. A grassroots nonprofit, CWC works to uphold the human right to water through education, organizing, advocacy and drinking water project development.
“An informational interview with 2009 Switzer Fellow Carolina Balazs connected me with the CWC,” Sánchez recalls. “I saw an exciting opportunity for collaboration.”
In this new role, Sánchez will apply her technical knowledge of water quality issues and treatment solutions to coordinate stakeholder engagement and bridge the gap between community members, governmental agencies, and other stakeholders in California. She will:
- Track drinking water technical assistance projects in order to identify gaps, share resources, build community partnerships and advocate for policy improvements;
- Empower community members to understand their drinking water, the environment that shapes it and ways to protect themselves by enacting and advocating for solutions;
- Facilitate community member advocacy campaigns for better water policy and protections.
This position jointly expands CWC’s capacity to add new technical assistance projects and to improve its environmental health data communication with community partners, while also offering Sánchez experience working directly with seasoned water justice leaders and professionals in her local communities of California’s Central Coast and San Joaquin Valley.
“As a Switzer Fellow, I have become entangled in the world of community water justice efforts through domestic well citizen science campaigns in California’s San Joaquin Valley,” Sánchez said. “Through my research, I witnessed the transformational power of community-led initiatives in the struggle for the human right to water in California.”
This Switzer Leadership Grant funds a unique role tailored to Sánchez’s professional development goals and the organizational needs of CWC, in order to support community-led groundwater stewardship and safe drinking water solutions in California rural low-income communities.
This project [will] transform my understanding of stakeholder collaborations, expand my connection with community leaders and governmental agencies, and guide my professional career.
Vida Sánchez, 2023 Switzer Fellow
Environmental and human impacts
Groundwater protection is essential for humans and for the environment. Groundwater provides an average of 40% of California's water supply, and up to 60% of the state’s water supply in dry years. Approximately 6 million Californians depend exclusively on groundwater, making these communities especially susceptible to the variability of water quality resulting from geologic context, land use, seasonality, and perturbations associated with climate change.
As drought, flooding, wildfire, and other climate change phenomena increasingly impact the natural and built landscape, California communities are increasingly expected to become water scarce and rely on groundwater as a drinking water source, underscoring the urgency of its regulation and protection. In addition to human uses of groundwater, Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems including lakes, rivers, wetlands, and deep-rooted plant communities heavily rely on groundwater to sustain their biota. In agricultural regions like the Central Coast and San Joaquin Valley where large quantities of groundwater are used for irrigation, drinking water and environmental uses must be protected.
Groundwater contamination can jeopardize environmental health. Pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, manure, and other agricultural field applications can impact water safety by migrating from fields and lawns to the water table. These contaminants contribute to the toxification and eutrophication of interconnected aquatic habitats, with particular risk to invertebrates, the foundation of aquatic food webs.
Contaminants like nitrates also have serious health implications on the human environment. Nitrate exposure through drinking water can cause methemoglobinemia, or “blue baby” syndrome, a life-threatening condition inhibiting the transport of oxygen in blood. Drinking water exposure to other contaminants like arsenic and chromium-6 have links to lung, bladder, and skin cancer and lung, nasal, and sinus cancer, respectively. Smaller water systems serving larger percentages of Latinos and socio-economically disadvantaged communities receive drinking water with higher nitrate and arsenic levels, respectively, signaling water injustices.
While large cities often have municipal drinking water systems that are monitored and regulated for 90+ contaminants by the state and federal government through the Clean Water Act (1972) and the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), smaller and decentralized drinking water systems remain unprotected and unregulated by the state. This project seeks to collaborate with communities impacted by contaminated water to provide short- and long-term support for securing safe drinking water, protecting groundwater through advocacy, and ensuring a safe environment for years to come.
Of the one million Californians lacking safe drinking water, small rural low-income communities of color are disproportionately affected, making groundwater management not only an environmental issue, but an environmental justice one.
Sánchez’s role aims for transformative community change through an innovative approach that jointly addresses the urgent needs of vulnerable communities and advocates for regulatory frameworks that protect life-sustaining water systems from agroindustrial contamination.
