1 Million Liters of Safe Drinking Water in Mexico

Dear GlobalGiving Supporters,

This year, we at Caminos de Agua are elated to be celebrating our tenth anniversary of working in collaboration with local communities, grassroots organizations, leading research institutions from around the globe, and supporters like you – all coming together to provide access to clean drinking water for so many in our region, and well beyond, whose health and wellbeing is being increasingly threatened.

This decade of impact simply wouldn’t have been possible without the early and continuing help and commitment from an incredible network of individual givers who have made this work a reality. To celebrate this milestone, two of our closest and oldest supporters – who were there to help Caminos get off the ground ten years ago – are taking their contribution to a new level to help launch us into our Next Ten Years of work. These sponsors, who wish to remain anonymous, are generously putting up a $25,000 dollar Match Challenge to our entire community, including all of you who contribute through GlobalGiving. That means that every dollar you give will automatically be doubled – up to $25,000 dollars. But you must act soon, as this challenge is only active through the end of October.

As we moved into June and July this year, we were starting to get nervous as the rains were simply not falling. Due to climate change, our rainy season continues to be more erratic, starting much later than normal for the past two years and with much more extreme rain events. All that said, luckily the rains started falling fiercely last month, and hundreds of families throughout our region began filling their newly installed rainwater harvesting systems for the first time!

In our last report, we let you know that we were able to nearly triple the number of rainwater harvesting systems between 2020 and 2021, and this year we are now on track to more than double our installations from last year. In fact, this year alone, we are on track to impact more families through the construction of new rainwater harvesting systems than we have in the last 5 years combined! Thanks to our “Agua y Salud’ (Water & Health) project, a massive 3-year project – focusing mainly on rainwater harvesting systems – being largely funded by the Gonzalo Río Arronte Foundation, we have been able to leverage support from new actors to help this work like the Municipal Government of San Diego de la Unión, new foundations like Alstom, and Rotoplas – a large Mexican corporation that specializes in making water storage tanks and cisterns, much of which we have updated you all on during our last report.

Through our Agua y Salud project, we continue working with our grassroots organizational partners SECOPA (Pozo Ademado Community Services), The San Cayetano Community Center, and CUVAPAS (United Communities for Life and Water) – a network of dozens of rural communities suffering from the most severe water quality and scarcity issues in our region. Together, along with our important organizational partner INANA, A.C., we are finishing the construction of 187 rainwater harvesting systems, across 33 different rural communities, in 4 municipalities.

We have also started our work with the Municipal Government of San Diego de la Unión in partnership with Rotoplas. We updated you in our last report that we had signed the contract with the government, and now we’ve hit the ground running and begun working in seven (7) additional communities to begin implementing the first 40+ rainwater harvesting systems of this extremely ambitious project. Our goal with this project has grown considerably. Originally, we had agreed with the municipal government to build 150 systems. Now, that number has increased to 230 full-scale rainwater harvesting systems that we plan to have all installed by the first quarter of 2023. Funds for this project are coming not only from the Municipal Government, but also from the Río Arronte Foundation, Rotoplas, and directly from us at Caminos de Agua through the generosity of individual supporters, just like you.

The scale at which we are working now is unprecedented for us, and we honestly could not do any of this work without you. Through your contributions, we are able to expand these projects and then leverage that support to bring other stakeholders to the table to invest in solutions as well – multiplying our collective impact substantially. The more we can raise, the more we can continue to expand clean water access to a continuously growing list of families suffering the devastating economic and health impacts of our regional water crisis. So, please, consider making a donation today. It will automatically be doubled, up to $25,000 dollars, allowing you to help do twice the good.

On behalf of the entire Caminos de Agua team, and our growing network of community partners, thank you for supporting this cause!

Saludos,
Dylan