Pooling Resources: How Collaboration & Data Are Shaping the Future of Drinking Water
In November 2023, EPIC, T.L.L. Temple Foundation, and the Mitchell Foundation began a collaborative effort to help prioritize investments and policies for improving drinking water equity in East Texas. This collaboration brought together EPIC, Mitchell, and T.L.L. Temple for the first time. This blog was written by the project lead, Charles Wight, in collaboration with Jerry Kenney of T.L.L. Temple Foundation, Ria Agarwal of Mitchell Foundation, and Jessie Mahr of EPIC’s Technology Program.
I grew up drinking out of the hose during summers in Texas. But for many folks across the state—and strange as it may seem in 2024—that isn’t a safe option. In fact, earlier this year, colleagues of mine in Lufkin, Texas were under a boil water watch for several days. As a native Texan and freshwater scientist, I appreciate the fact that, hydrologically, our state is complicated. Droughts often dry up wells and shrivel croplands, while floods and hurricanes displace people and account for hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. What I was less aware of were looming challenges to our drinking water systems. And while droughts and floods are typically episodic events that vacillate across—and devastate—different communities, drinking water quality affects all Texans all the time. It also puts the vital role water equity plays at the center of the conversation.
Texas faces significant challenges when it comes to drinking water infrastructure—including pipe leaks, arsenic contamination, unprecedented population growth, and the intensifying effects of climate change. The EPA’s recent Drinking Water Needs Assessment estimates a $61.5 billion requirement over the next 20 years to upgrade and maintain the state’s drinking water infrastructure, ranking Texas second highest in national needs—an 11.7 percent increase from 2015. Equally alarming is that only around five percent of eligible drinking water systems in Texas have received assistance from the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF)—the largest source of funding for water infrastructure—during the past decade.
Question: Jerry, what makes T.L.L. Temple excited about this project?
The current realities facing underserved rural East Texas communities, like the lack of access to safe and reliable drinking water, are unacceptable and require immediate fixes. Yet, immediate one-off efforts aren’t enough. This project is showing how to catalyze new data platforms and investments to develop better solutions at scale. Instead of just asking “what’s necessary?” in one place, we’re leveraging our resources and partnerships to figure out what’s possible through innovation. By being willing to take these big, complicated water infrastructure challenges head on, this project can help address immediate needs and chart a course toward a more durable, thriving rural future.
Yet there are signs of hope. I’m excited both by a growing momentum across Texas to improve water issues, as well as the collaborative drinking water equity project we kicked off with Mitchell and T.L.L. Temple Foundations last fall—where we’ve done a deep dive into the data and infrastructure challenges. Over the past 4 months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with EPIC’s Technology team, our partners at Mitchell and Temple, and dozens of stakeholders in and outside of Texas. I began with a framework designed to answer a perceptively challenging question: How durable is your water supply?
We’ve been exploring the term durable because, on the one hand, we can relate it to specific metrics (e.g., enforcement actions), and on the other, we can more easily discuss someone’s water supply in rural Texas since durability also captures concerns with water quality now and into the future. After robust research, workshops, and rounds of feedback, we started thinking about water durability as a function of hydrologic, socioeconomic, and governance factors. For example, your water supply may be durable if it has adequate supplies for future scenarios—or an affordable water rate for its customers. Likewise, a water system may not be durable if there’s a high delinquency in payments, or if a water utility doesn’t have a plan for infrastructure projects.
Question: Ria, how is this project compare to Mitchell’s earlier investments in the water space?
The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation has long been among the key funders strategically investing in a sustainable water future for all Texans. We have always valued opportunities to partner with other foundations to leverage our impact, and are energized by the new wave of philanthropic collaborations across the state. We are excited about this opportunity to partner with the T.L.L. Temple Foundation which has a rich history of supporting rural and underserved East Texas communities and is stepping into the water space for the first time. Through this partnership with the T.L.L. Temple Foundation and EPIC, we are hopeful that we can drive greater investments in Texas water, and to communities that have been historically disinvested in.
Working on water in collaboration
The collaboration between our project partners is also poised to catalyze innovation and generate statewide impact. T.L.L. Temple, for instance—venturing into the water domain for the first time—joined forces with the Mitchell Foundation on this work given their extensive expertise in the Texas water space. EPIC’s Technology Team, with its focus on leveraging data and tech in policy design, bolstered this alliance by helping wrangle the key data to guide investments. Together, we’re aiming to expand access to safe, reliable, and affordable drinking water. In this first phase of work, that means we’re focused on answering these priority questions:
What data exists about water in Texas?
What data can be used to guide decision-making?
What data gaps exist to inform where to prioritize action?
As many readers may already know, there’s no shortage of data on drinking water in the Lone Star State. But the data that does exist comes in different formats (and varies in quality), which historically has made it hard to leverage in decision-making. Our project aims to foreground—and tackle—disparities in drinking water access by collecting that key data across federal, state, and municipal sources. And we’re engaging in discussions with numerous stakeholders to understand how this data is used, what questions about it we may have missed previously, and to ensure that any work we do complements existing expertise in the field.
What we’ve done and where we’re headed
Question: Jessie, what’s unique about Texas drinking water and its data landscape?
What’s clearer now more than ever is the sheer volume of this data, and its potential to drive better decision-making in Texas. The challenge is that it varies widely in terms of format and location. The real value we see is in synthesizing and standardizing that data so it can actually guide equitable decisions. That also means targeted policy recommendations to the many agencies managing this data, so it’s easier for them (and the public!) to make use of it.
What’s particularly energizing to me—and a great lens onto this work—is the set of principles we’ve applied in the course of this project. These include:
Multi-disciplinary teams: We are building strong collaborations at the onset of this project such that our core team is composed of water and policy experts, programmers, statisticians, and community liaisons.
Stakeholder engagement: Not only does an engaged community of practice lead to a better and more accurate dataset—it also creates the foundation for improvements and maintenance of the data over time.
Collaborative nature: Texas has many water challenges requiring a diverse set of skills and people to solve them; and we continuously invite more people in—there’s space for everyone.
User-centered, FAIR data: Through the methodology and publication of this data, we followed FAIR principles—data that’s Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable—but also took it one step further to embody user-centered design principles.
Sustained Iteration: Given the open, iterative nature of development, we know this work will continue to foster opportunities for building an ecosystem of engaged contributors along the way.
This work to date has me optimistic that we possess—and can develop—the tools we need to build a new water future for all Texans. In the coming weeks, our team will be working carefully to finalize preliminary analyses, and continue engaging with stakeholders on results as we refine our outputs and next steps. If you’re interested in drinking water equity in Texas, please don’t hesitate to reach out to get involved (or learn more) about this important work.