Episode 23: Advancing water justice in underserved communities
“Disadvantaged communities are underrepresented by the media, underserved by their government, and understudied by us, the scientists, so how can we start moving forward?”
Angel Fernandez-Bou & jose pablo ortiz partida
A conversation with Dr. Angel Fernandez-Bou (UC Merced) and Dr. Jose Pablo Ortiz Partida (Union of Concerned Scientists) about water equity issues and opportunities for improvement in California’s changing climate. Released June 4, 2021.
guests on the show
Angel Fernandez-Bou
Dr. Angel Fernandez-Bou is a scientist at the University of California, Merced who does multidisciplinary work to preserve resources and habitat for society and nature. He specifically partners with vulnerable and disadvantaged communities to build climate change resilience. He also democratizes scientific knowledge by developing low-cost devices for environmental monitoring and promoting STEM K-12 education. He co-created the nonprofit organization 4 Venir to teach advanced scientific topics to children to motivate them to pursue higher education. Angel holds a PhD in Environmental Systems from the University of California, Merced, a MSc in Biosystems Engineering and Water Resources from the Fluminense Federal University (Brazil), and a BEng in Agricultural Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain). Learn more about his Underrepresented, Understudied, Underserved study here and follow him on Twitter @DrFernandezBou.
Jose Pablo Ortiz Partida
Dr. Jose Pablo Ortiz Partida is a Bilingual Western States Climate Scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Dr. Ortiz also works on developing strategies for vulnerable sectors and populations in California to cope and adapt to the current and projected impacts of climate change, particularly related to water impacts. He also analyzes how changing climate patterns impact key sectors and populations in West Coast states, especially with regards to precipitation and water supply changes. Before joining UCS, Dr. Ortiz earned his Ph.D. in hydrology and water resources science from the University of California, Davis, and a BS in environmental engineering from Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO). Learn more about his Climate Change Action Guide for Households and Communities here and follow him on Twitter @PabloWater.
Transcript
Sam Sandoval
Welcome, bienvenidos a Water Talk. In today's episode, we're talking with Pablo Ortiz, who is a Climate and Water scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and Angel Fernandez-Bou postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at UC Merced. So this was back in November, when I noticed the research that Pablo and Angel were doing related to disadvantaged communities, mostly Hispanic communities in the San Joaquin and Tulare basins. And I wanted to invite them so our audience can listen firsthandto the compounding challenges that these communities and individuals are facing. So we're talking here about children, women, moms, men, related to their environment, such as water, air, food. In addition, they are living with a limited economic budget. So Faith, Mallika, what should our audience listen for?
Faith Kearns
I think, you know, during another drought year these issues are going to become even more heightened than they already were. And so it's a really important topic for this year in particular, although it's always a background issue in the state. But I think the issue of the human right to water and how that intersects with groundwater use and surface water availability, all of that will continue to be a really big issue this year. And I think just thinking particularly about the cumulative impacts of all these various stressors that people are facing, is a really, really important point.
Mallika Nocco
I thought this was interesting, and I guess I'll share like I just shared with Sam and Faith, in thinking about this episode: this is the only Water Talk episode where I actually cried when we were taping it. Because it is really emotional. So and I do think, Faith, I think a lot about your book in integrating the emotion into what's happening, and also just for people who are going and doing the work and acting as researchers and practitioners. And I felt like in doing this study that Pablo and Angel actually were acting as practitioners in some sense, as well as researchers, in order to kind of capture some of the narratives and they do a really good job,interweaving narrative, science, policy, and politics. And I think that's a wonderful thing to try to listen for in the conversations with them.
Faith Kearns
I thought one of the most interesting things and the hardest things that they dealt with was that a lot of these issues arose for them when they were working with children. And that's how they first encountered and really had a felt experience of the inequities that exist in the Central Valley. And so that's a really telling part of what's going on.
Mallika Nocco
California is a state with such wealth, and such opulence. And to think about how within the same state, there are communities who are living under such circumstances, I think it's really it's really eye opening for those who aren't aware of it. And it also is just kind of harrowing to think about it in terms of the way in which those of us who live in California like to view our state, and to think about like what is all what is happening on all of our watch, I think is is an interesting thing to think about.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, I would like to also point our audience to a couple of things that I noticed there. So the first one is that as you are gonna be listening Pablo and Angel, you're gonna see the how they are tiptoeing to some of these staggering numbers that they are saying, from Hispanic and Latin American perspective, this is very cultural, they are trying to say these things forcefully, but at the same time, find the right attitude. So just look for that. And the second one is that this is an episode that is really close to my heart, basically, I mean for the Hispanic community that is being represented in here. And you know, these are the people that are bringing the vegetables and fruit to our kitchen. And yet they've been put in such a hazzard. And the one other thing is that, unfortunately, they are invisible, essential, but invisible to many of us. And I hope that these episodes bring them out. So let's bring them out of the invisibility and let's enjoy this conversation with Pablo and Angel. Hola Pablo, hola Angel.
Pablo Ortiz
Es una pleasur para estar aca.
Angel Fernandez
Hola. Hello, thank you so much for inviting us.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, welcome welcome bienvenidos. So it's our pleasure having both of you on the podcast. So you may think of California about the wealth of the state, Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, Disneyland. But rarely we think about poverty and disadvantaged communities. In 2020, it is estimated that about 9.4 million out of 40 million people living in California, so about 25%, are living in so called disadvantaged communities. Today, we have two experts that have worked quite closely with disadvantaged communities. And that can explain us about the injustices that these communities experience. So, let me start with you and Angel. Angel, can you share with us your path to California and explain us how you got interested in disadvantaged communities?
Angel Fernandez
Yes, I love nature. And this is one of my passions. However, it took me a while to figure out my vocation, right, my ideal job. I studied engineering. I was living in Spain back then. And then I started working but the work didn't fulfill me. And then I came back to grad school. I was in Brazil, living in Brazil, when I studied my masters. And for the first time I liked my work, I was doing something meaningful for society, doing research about treating wastewater, landfill, leachate, modeling river flow to forecast flows to optimize energy. And then I decided I wanted to be a scientist.
I found an opportunity to study my PhD in environmental systems at UC Merced with a project in Costa Rica about soil, CO2 emissions, and hydrology. And I moved to California, and of course, I loved California; I noticed that California is not only the financial engine of the United States, it's also the moral compass in many ways. And as a person with a diverse background, I felt very comfortable here. And in 2016, a few months after I arrived in California, along with some friends, we started doing workshops for children. We knew someone in the Merced County Office of Education, and they invited us to prepare some summer activities for children. They were kids from migrant families. And some of them didn't even speak English. And they wanted us to be role models for the kids.
So we started giving workshops about advanced scientific topics such as robotics, ecology, archaeology, engineering, it was very fun for the kids, they loved it. And that was my first real contact with the inequities that exist in California, because many of those kids came from vulnerable communities. So many of those kids had parents who are farm workers, and they move around looking for work. And the kids don't even have a fixed school. Some of those kids just thought in the beginning that going to the university was not for them, because they could never make it, they are poor, or they are not good enough. And after seeing us, many of us Hispanics, many of us coming from humble backgrounds, and being almost doctors or, you know, with a lot of knowledge in engineering, in electronics, in the environment, in science, those kids realize that they could also pursue higher education, and some of them are brilliant.
So we have been continuing doing this, we have created a nonprofit organization called 4 Venir , and we still work with the kids today. But that first contact with disadvantaged communities and disadvantaged populations was very important for me, I felt the necessity of working to improve California, you know, don't don't get me wrong, California is amazing. But I think that kind of inequity, you know, California needs to know about it. So when they graduated, they had the opportunity to work addressing water and environmental issues in California. And they decided to focus on how to include disadvantaged communities of California in our research. So in our lab, we study water and natural resources, location based on socio economic and environmental constraints. We use large scale models when the size of the communities is often very small. And I was there in the beginning, trying to figure out how to include these disadvantaged communities in our work. And that is when I met Paolo, he was in a similar position to me with a similar background, similar interests, and we decided to join efforts and in the meanwhile we have become good friends.
Sam Sandoval
I another thing you're mentioning is a good portrait of realizing the need of some of these communities experiencing it firsthand. So Pablo, can you share us your path to California and how you got interested in disadvantaged communities.
Pablo Ortiz
I'm originally from Mexico, and I was lucky enough to get a scholarship from the Mexican government to do my PhD in hydrology, anwith focus on Water Resources Management at UC Davis. And since I was very young, I have been interested in water. And it's like these moments when you go to the ocean, or you go to a lake and you see a river and you are just amazed at what you're seeing, and I always like that a lot. And also, some of the things that got me into water was the million of children that die every year because they don't have access to clean water in the world. And I have always been wanted to do something about it.
My PhD research didn't focus on that, it was most related to bigger scale reservoir operations, mostly for environmental flows. But now working for the Union of Concerned Scientists, I've been able to basically change the scale of my research focusing more on disadvantaged communities. And my current research is on how climate change is affecting disadvantaged communities, mainly in California. And just to be on the same page, there are at least a couple definitions of disadvantaged communities, and one of them is very related to the economic side of things. And this is a disadvantaged community household that gets 80% of the median income of California. And for California, the median income is around $71,000 per year. So if you get together a group of families, that in average receives 80% of that, so about $57,000 or less per family, then you start getting a disadvantaged community now, and many of the families received way less than that 57,000 per year. So that's a very economic perspective or definition from disadvantaged community.
There is another one that I like more that is from the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, or OEHHA. Disadvantaged communities refers to areas throughout California which mostly suffer from disproportionate share of economic health and environmental burdens. And these burdens present in different ways. Now, it can be burdens related to poverty and high unemployment rates. It can be air and water pollution, it can be presence of hazardous waste because of the industries that tend to be around these communities, or high incidence, for example of asthma or diseases on or even cancers in some locations.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, thanks, Pablo, thanks for sharing your path to California, but also to pointed out some of these key concepts. One of the things that I know that both of you have been working is in documenting how disadvantaged communities have been or are under represented, underserved, and under studied in California. Can you share with those in our audience, the work that you've been doing related with this?
Angel Fernandez
Yep, Pablo, and I have attended many conferences, symposiums, events, where other researchers always mention the importance of including disadvantaged communities in our research. But then when we asked them how to include them, they said, "Oh, I don't know, but we should include them". So it was very frustrating in the beginning, that researchers senior to us didn't have the response to something that everyone was assuming we should be doing. So we decided to find out why that occurred and how we can prevent to continue. But we must also say that there is something that is very important in that we our engineers and natural scientists and social scientists to be talking about disadvantaged communities for much longer and there is a lot of good information from the social science perspective, so our aim is not to override the work done by a social scientist or or to reinvent the wheel, but is to integrate in that social science knowledge in our engineering and natural science knowledge.
So we want to point out to the real importance of creating real multidisciplinarity. And real multidisciplinarity is difficult because it means that you have to go out of your comfort zone, that may mean visiting disadvantaged communities to learn firsthand what's actually going on there, or learning new topics in a different background that you never thought you would have to learn. But it means that you cannot be all the super expert in a very narrow topic, you need to understand how your topic affects everyone and how everyone affects your topic at many different levels. So with this in mind, we started to work on this and other projects involving disadvantaged communities.
Pablo Ortiz
We wanted to start also at a very basic level of what is then the representation of disadvantaged communities. And in this case in California, we did an analysis of the representation of disadvantaged communities in three different platforms, one being newspaper articles, second, legislation, and third, scientific or peer review articles. And then we started with the peer review articles. And from from the databases, we got a little bit over 150,000 papers related to California, and then look for what was the frequency or how many of these papers talk about disadvantaged communities. And it was very surprising for us, only about 68 papers mentioned disadvantaged communities. So it was a little bit embarrassing to say the least.
And then we continue with newspaper articles, and again, from our database of newspaper articles, we got 2.6 million articles from 240 different newspapers. And there, we found about 1400 newspaper articles that mentioned disadvantaged communities in different ways. And here, the important numbers to remember are that the ratio is about 2000 to one. So out of 2000 articles about one talks about disadvantaged communities. And this is very surprising considering that we have almost 10 million people in California living in these types of communities now. So some people may say well, of course now, like, there are so many different topics, so many things to talk about. So, of course, we're not gonna be always talking about disadvantaged communities now, but then just start looking at other topics, that maybe at least from my personal perspective are superficial or not as important as people having clean water to drink or clean air, you know?
So for example, if you look at, okay, how many times Elon Musk is mentioned, or Lady Gaga is mentioned, it is way many more times than people that don't have access to water in the richest state of the world, in the richest country of the world. So it's honestly very surprising. So then the last one is legislation. And this is about 11,000 deals from 2017, basically to today, and how many talks about disadvantaged communities, and here the ratio was about 50 to one so a little bit better. Then the question is, if legislation is putting attention in disadvantaged communities, why is it not working? Why do we still have about a million people in California without reliable access to a human right? And this is only talking about water, but there are other issues related to air quality, infrastructure, public services, representation, etc. So that's where the title of the paper that we are writing comes comes from, on the represented by the media, by their governments, and understood by us, the scientist. So how can we start moving forward?
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, thanks, Pablo. Those are super staggering numbers. I mean, just to think about that, again, we are in the state of California and all these things that are happening, but either we're not paying attention or decided not to work on it. So we know that they are not represented in scientific studies, the media, and the legislation even worse, while these issues have a larger negative impact when they compound with other issues, again, such as poor air quality, insecurity, lack of access to good education. So how can we solve? How can we mitigate these issues?
Angel Fernandez
Well, first, we need to understand the issues that happen to disadvantaged communities. And there are many different social and environmental injustices occurring in the communities at the same time. So you can imagine how a community is, you go there and the water is contaminated, or there is no water. The air quality is very poor. There are no sidewalks, no parks, no street lights, the education districts are among the worst in the country, there is no public transportation. So it's not one thing. It's true that they don't have water. It's true that they have poor air quality. But it's the combination of all those things happening at the same time.
So we looked at the literature and we saw a very broad framework. So for example, saying, okay, disadvantaged communities have problems with water, they have problems with education, they have problems with economy, right. But during this study, we went to the communities and we conducted interviews with more than 20 stakeholders, ranging from community leaders and residents, to advocates from nonprofits, educators, politicians, even public servants, all of them know very well the issues that the communities undergo. So then, in the beginning of our interviews, remember that we went to a community with very bad water quality. And we knew that the water sometimes comes black from the faucet. And we asked them what their main environmental concern was. And to our surprise, they said the air. So we knew the air quality was really bad, disgusting, you can say, but we thought that their main concern would be that access to water, but it was the air, you know, and that happened in many other communities and many other different levels, too.
Surprising responses, I would say, in our interviews, we gave the interviewees a lot of freedom to identify whatever concerns they had about environmental or socio economic issues. And we had a very long list. So when we look back into the literature, we see these broad frameworks that are useful to identify large scale problems such as water insecurity or poor quality. But both frameworks do not help identifying these specific local issues and nuances that frameworks do not identify well existing specific problems. And it is necessary to disaggregate them into smaller pieces.
So when we analyze the corpus of all these publications that I was mentioning, 1000s, millions of publications using the broad framework, the representation of the communities was not good. But when we use the framework that the communities provided us, the results were much worse, much, much worse. So for example, there are some publications like scientific publications about issues with water in disadvantaged communities. It's true, but 94% of all interviewees told us that bottled water, and water bills and this kind of thing was one of their main problems, one of the main problems in their communities, for their families and for the neighbors. And do you know how many scientific papers mentioned that out of those 150,000? I tell you zero. Zero. So we need to understand better the issues in the context of the disadvantaged communities if we want to solve them.
So think about another generic topic such as air quality problems. It may not call the attention of Californians, right, because all of us live in California, where there are a lot of quality air quality problems relate to traffic and to wildfires. And you would say that you also have air quality problems. You cannot go with your dog outside or you cannot exercise or you need to change your filters more often or your car gets dirty. Yeah, well, I mean, those are problems. Yes. But the air quality problems in disadvantaged communities are much more specific, such as pesticide drift entering homes through the windows at night during the summer in homes without air conditioning in the Central Valley that is extremely hot. So it's difficult to imagine these things when you live in your house in the comfort of a nice house in the city when you have air conditioning and you can close your window whenever you want. We'll just have to turn on the air conditioner. But some people don't have that privilege. And, yeah, those are some of the things that we have realized that we need to analyze more in depth. And this means that communities are very different, each one from each other. And they need different approaches and different solutions.
Pablo Ortiz
To add to what Angel is saying, because that part is very important, we tend to see disadvantaged communities as a monolith that have the same problems, water problems or air quality problems. But once you start looking at these nuances, as Angel said, there are differences. And then the approaches need to be different as well. And also, once you start putting all these pieces together, then you have like, compound inequities. So one clear example is the education aspect of it. Now, we could say that the Central Valley or in particular in the San Joaquin Valley, that is one of the worst education districts in the country, then maybe the students are not so good. Now, hypothetically speaking, if you start looking at the root of the education inequities here, then it may be not even related to the education that has been delivered. Like it may be because the children are hungry, or they don't feel safe. It may be because they go to school during the summer, when it's really hot in the Central Valley, sometimes reaching 105 to 110 Farenheit degrees. And some schools don't have air conditioning.
It may be because during winter, there are no sidewalks in their communities, or there are holes in the streets, or there is a pond in front of the school. And then the children need to spend the whole day with their socks and their shoes wet. It may be because again, they are hungry because their parents don't have enough money to pay for for food, or maybe because they are thirsty because some communities have really bad water. And even in the schools, they cannot drink the water if they don't bring bottled water. And then the poor performance in the schools may be a consequence of all these co occurrences of different problems rather or I like to call them inequities, because it's not like these communities are asking for more. They're asking for the basic things. A lot of people say that communities wants more but they don't want more than us just want the same, yeah. They want the basics, they want the park, they want streetlights, they want sidewalks.
Sam Sandoval
So what about the current government? Are they doing any investing there?
Pablo Ortiz
Yes, so here at first I had a lot of hope. And then I was reading some news a few months ago that about $100 million from the budget, were going to be allocated by different grants or by different budget points, about 200 million to disadvantaged communities. And then I was like, okay, that seems like a lot of money. That's good progress. But then I look at, for example, the Oakland Police Department now, and it has $100 million more than what is going to be located here to disadvantaged communities, then you start looking at getting disappointed at where we are putting our money and our values. Because this is literally people that can't drink the water in their homes. And it's very embarrassing. to be honest, for California.
Sam Sandoval
Is there any improving understanding of some of the legislators or the decision makers to mitigate these extreme inequality?
Angel Fernandez
I think it's improving. I think the legislators understand that the problems in disadvantaged communities can be solved. And, I mean, we think that they know about it, and they are trying to do it, but maybe they are a little slow. But of course, I mean, some advocates are doing amazing work from the community, some from nonprofits, and they have big wins with the government. And even though maybe, it's not enough money, but still, it might be a good starting point. And I mean, obviously it's always better if they do it faster, but at least I think they have their heart in the correct direction and they can begin to solve these problems.
But it's not only them, I think also that the news and the media can also contribute to create awareness of these issues in disadvantaged communities. If many people know about these issues, the communities will have more political leverage that they have now, because many of them are too small or even umincorporated so they don't belong to a municipality. And the influence of news media in the public opinion about the perception of the disadvantaged communities is very important. So right now their coverage is too little. And it tends to be too broad, missing these co-occurring inequities and the urgency of the solutions.
And also very, very important, we scientists must stop assuming what problems is disadvantaged communities have, and we need to start using much more often community-based-learning and find out about those problems firsthand. So our results suggest that researchers assume what is better for the communities and this leads to unsatisfactory results for the communities. So if you're a scientist willing to work with disadvantaged communities, please stop thinking that your project is going to help if you have asked those that your project is supposed to help. Go and reach the community, ask them, contact advocates, nonprofit organizations, they will guide you. You can contact us, contact Pablo and me, and we will try to help you make a first contact if we can we know because many others have helped us before.
Pablo Ortiz
And also I just want to highlight what Angel was saying about the organizations that work directly with community members in the valley, for example, Community Water Center, Clean Water Action, Self Help Enterprises, the Leadership Council. These are community based organizations in the valley working directly with community members, and we have learned so much from them.
Sam Sandoval
And that actually leads me to my following question, ow easy or difficult was for you to perform the study there? What have you learned?
Pablo Ortiz
Yes, it was first intellectually difficult because we both got out of our comfort zones. We had to develop the interviews. And then there is this thing called a institutional review board that social scientists are super well aware of those, but we weren't. So it was like, okay, what do we need to do for this, because you need to do like, a bunch of paperwork to be able to go and do interviews if you are doing research. So that was our first learning. And it's like, a much slower process. Once you need to talk to people and once you need to analyze the interviews and get all these different topics that are the concerns of disadvantaged community members in this case, and also the emotional part. Because then you start going to these communities, and you start absorbing whether you like it or not some of these inequities, and you feel the urge to do something, and you start getting tired. And after three interviews in one day, you just get home or wherever you are staying. And it's very tiring some days, but very rewarding at the same time.
Angel Fernandez
Yeah, I agree emotionally it is difficult, because we meet these very nice people. And we go to their homes and see how they have issues that we didn't imagine. I mean, you cannot even imagine those things and like, they have to buy hundreds of dollars a bottle of water each month, and this is very heavy on on their pockets, and they still are paying some of the highest bills for the water. And you know, it is toxic, they cannot even cook with it, or sometimes they have a bath and they have rashes, because the water is really, really bad or have like some pollutants or heavy metals. So and also intellectually, it was very challenging, because as we said before, we are trying to address truly multidisciplinary work and that is sometimes exhausting. But our final goal is amplifying the voices of the communities and use our expertise to leverage the wisdom that communities already have. And they have taught us about it and to apply the science and our expertise that we already know, like all scientists know, to creating these solutions that actually solve problems in the communities.
Sam Sandoval
In a following up with that the next step, I think you're doing a lot of good work in terms of providing researchers and the entire scientific community very nice educational guides? Well, the last one that you published is called Climate Change in the San Joaquin Valley: A Household and Community Guide to Taking Action. And that is in English in Spanish. I really like it. I mean, that is a super short, a 27, 28 page document that has very nice infographics. Could you explain a little bit more about this educational guide?
Pablo Ortiz
Yes. And just to start, these guide came from their concerns that we listened through the interviews that we did. And the idea was to take these concerns and basically evaluate how some of those concerns are likely to get worse with climate change, particularly if we don't do something about it. So it's an educational guide, targeted at community members. And it's so that they can get this information because from my perspective, information is power. And if they know they have this information, and they know what is going on, what's happening, they can use it to advocate for their own communities, and ask for changes. So the guide includes adaptation and coping strategies to climate change that individuals and communityies can take.
However, something very important to say is that most of the adaptation strategies should be taken by local, state, and federal governments, we need systemic actions at this time, bigger scale actions to tackle climate change. And sadly, we had to start developing these sort of guides, because we don't see that these resources or investments are coming anytime soon. And communities needs to have this knowledge so that they can start preparing themselves. I'm sorry, just to add, for the people or the audience that wants to learn a little bit more, if you type climate change, San Joaquin Valley, UCS or Union of Concern Scientists, then it should come out at the top. And it's available in English and Spanish.
Angel Fernandez
In science, we are used to have peer review articles or peer review applications. And in this case, the guide has also been peer reviewed, but by community leaders by community members, educators from the communities, they have provided us with amazing insights, not only during interview processes or when we visited the communities, but also after when we produce something and they continue giving us advice.
So it has been reviewed by many people, many more than when we publish papers, right. And for my perspective, working on the guide has been very fulfilling, despite sometimes is hard to read or write about the injustice problems in the disadvantaged communities. And especially the impact that climate change is having and is going to have there that is disproportionate, as is the impact of COVID. Because we are seeing how our communities in the Central Valley Hispanic communities are totally disproportionately more affected by COVID. You know, and when there is a problem, it is worse in disadvantaged communities. But the fact that we are writing a scientific guide, combining our expertise with the wisdom from the communities has been a pleasure. And I hope the guide reaches many homes and many stakeholders, and they can be informed and ready to decide how to be for climate change.
Sam Sandoval
What would you like our listeners to know about what you do? How can we support your work?
Pablo Ortiz
Yes. So I mean, they have been really listening about what we do. So something that I would like to mention besides that is that sometimes communities are seen as as areas with problems, but we need to change that perspective and see them as areas of opportunities and solutions. Because brilliant, warm hearted people live in these communities and they have been historically left behind to injustices and inequities in our state. More than a loss for them it is a loss for us. Because the people in these communities have surprised us time and time again. And they like to give a lot like, and I like to collect examples.
We went to one community member, his name is Jose Ornelas. And he helped us so much. He was a council member of the city of San Joaquin. And we got there he received us, connected us to many people that also helped to develop this educational guide. And he dedicated his life to improve the community he grew up in. And he suddenly died in July from COVID. And he's the one that was more worried about the air quality in his community than water even thought that water was coming from.
Angel Fernandez
I would like to add that instead of supporting our work, maybe support the work of these fantastic advocates, I just have to say I have all the respect for those advocates who fight every day for their communities, both residents and from nonprofit organizations such as Leadership Council, Community Water Center, Self Help Enterprises, Clean Water Action, and many others. But it's so admirable how these residents and community leaders do so much and fight so hard for the neighbors for their families. And we have been impressed and inspired by their efforts. Please support the good work that is being done in the communities.