An Interview with Howard Neukrug

Executive Director, The Water Center at the University of Pennsylvania

What is The Water Center at Penn?

The Water Center at Penn is a community-focused research center working to find integrated solutions to the multiple challenges facing our world’s water systems and their watersheds. We strive to be a trusted, reliable partner whose work accelerates water equity by connecting, convening, and collaborating across the sector.

The Water Center’s research approach is centered around working alongside communities, bringing their knowledge and expertise to the solutions addressing their water challenges, sharing power and responsibility, and encouraging communities to take the lead in determining priorities, questions to be asked, and the approach to answering those questions. We share resources, education, training, and applied knowledge to support community goals.

The Water Center’s research staff and project partners hold a diverse range of expertise to help us manage a comprehensive range of applied research projects. Our work is organized around the four core themes of Water

Offers direct support to munici - tribes, and water utilities in the Mid-Atlantic region to help them access federal and state funding to address water infrastructure needs.

Equity, Building Community Climate Resilience, Water Leadership, and Innovation. We achieve this through policy analysis, technical assistance and leadership training, network building, and convening conversations around critical water topics. By leveraging our expertise and partnering with others across our thematic and project areas, we can better analyze our project outcomes and build upon and model existing research.

Water equity is one of the Water Center’s core theme areas. Can you give an example of your work to advance water equity? Much of the work that The Water Center takes on touches on issues of water equity, but one recent project comes to mind.

The Water Center is part of a group of seven organizations that manage the Region 3 Water Technical Assistance (WaterTA) program , which offers direct support to municipalities, tribes, and water utilities in the Mid-Atlantic region to help them access federal and state funding to address water infrastructure needs. Coordinated by the University of Maryland Environmental Finance

How does the Water Center’s work address a community’s water needs?

One example of The Water Center’s efforts to address community water needs lies in our long-term commitment to the Cobbs Creek neighborhood, which is located along an urbanized stretch of the Cobbs Creek in West Philadelphia. We are working with community partners as leaders to build capacity to address local water issues while providing STEM learning opportunities for youth through a Summer

Enrichment Program with public high schools and a coordinated stream monitoring effort across multiple partners to generate reportable data to state and federal agencies. We are working towards a long-term goal of restoring the water quality and aquatic ecosystems of Cobbs Creek so that community members can better engage with the creek and enjoy the health and psychological benefits it provides.

What are you most excited about in the coming months?

We were thrilled to announce the launch of our re-branded journal earlier this year, now titled The International Journal for Water Equity and Justice (IJWEJ)!

The ultimate goal is to make the greater Philadelphia region a major leader in water policy and technology solutions like other parts of the world that are clear centers of water leadership—places like Singapore, the Netherlands, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Formerly The Journal of Gender and Water (wH2O), founded in 2013, the journal's new name reflects a broader mission to promote scholarly and creative discourse related to global progress and challenges around water equity and justice. IJWEJ is an online, open-access journal co-published by the Water Center at Penn and Penn Libraries.

Our first Call for Submissions under the re-branded journal is now live, and more information can be found on the journal’s website here. We expect the first volume of the newly branded journal to be published in early Spring 2024, with a theme that reflects the journal’s expanded scope and vision: emergent and groundbreaking work addressing water equity and justice issues globally.

What’s next for the Water Center?

One of the Water Center’s ongoing goals is to establish a water research hub in the Northeast region of the US that brings together a diverse set of experts in the water space, including water utilities, environmental non-profits, academia, and private industry. The ultimate goal is to make the greater Philadelphia region a major leader in water policy and technology solutions like other parts of the world that are clear centers of water leadership— places like Singapore, the Netherlands, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

As a starting point, the Water Center has created a corporate roundtable this year to collaborate and strategize on water-related policies. So far, the Roundtable has engaged over two dozen major companies operating in the water sector.

The Water Center engages and partners with many organizations to further the Center's important mission to support communities meeting critical water challenges. To learn more about our work and partnership opportunities, please visit https:// watercenter.sas.upenn.edu.