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The Water Education Foundation: Helping Professionals and the Public Understand Western Water
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he Water Education Foundation has been educating water professionals and the general public in California and across the Colorado River basin for more than 40 years. Its tours, conferences, publications, and online resources make the complex world of western water more easily comprehensible while also highlighting the high stakes of the issues involved. In this interview, Executive Director Jennifer Bowles tells Municipal Water Leader about the foundation’s history, its current activities, and its importance for the municipal water audience. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Jennifer Bowles: I was a journalist for much of my career, first at the Associated Press in Los Angeles and later at a newspaper in Southern California, where I spent a lot of time covering water issues. In addition, I had been a Scripps fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for a year, studying water law and policy at the law school. When I was a newspaper reporter, I took a tour of the lower Colorado River with the Water Education Foundation, which is how I first became aware of the organization. The then executive director sent me one of the foundation’s California water maps after that tour, and I hung that map everywhere my desk was moved in the newsroom because of how much it helped me to understand water issues in California. It showed where the water came from and where it went—which is sometimes hundreds of miles away. The foundation strives to be extremely neutral and impartial in everything it does, including in writing its water news, so I think my journalism background and my writing and editing skills were an important factor in my being hired by the board 6 years ago. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the foundation and its history.
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The foundation brings tour attendees to visit Diamond Valley Lake, the reservoir built by Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
for Water Education for Teachers. With that program, we began to organize workshops across the state to train educators on how to teach lessons on water in the classroom. During the 1990s, we also started a 1-year leadership program for the various stakeholder groups known as Water Leaders; today, there are more than 400 graduates of that program. In 1997, we also started our Colorado River Project and began applying many of our programs in California to the Colorado River basin, which is a key water source for Southern California. We started programs, wrote news articles, and started planning a lower Colorado River tour. Most importantly, we began holding a high-level Colorado River Symposium every 2 years, which brought together people from all seven states that rely on the river,
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE WATER EDUCATION FOUNDATION.
Jennifer Bowles: The foundation was founded in 1977, in the middle of a bad drought in California. At the beginning, it had a small staff—one person, for the most part—and worked primarily on its Western Water news magazine. But we eventually grew and began hosting conferences because it was clear to my predecessor that the various stakeholders needed a neutral place to discuss the often thorny issues associated with water. We also started running tours and creating those beautiful educational maps of California water regions. The 1990s were a key time for the foundation. That’s when we became the California coordinator for a national program known as Project WET, which stands
Four members of the foundation’s Water Leaders program stand by Hoover Dam during the lower Colorado River tour.
