Music focuses and motivates Carolin (she/her). Swimming & riding her bike energizes and activates her. Developing and providing access to safe water pushes her every day. Carolin’s community action project aimed to be an intercultural and intergenerational exchange of ideas all relating to water quality, access, and sustainable solutions to ensure everyone has access to safe water. 

Currently, Carolin is pursuing a Double-Degree PhD program at Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands) and Ghent University (Belgium) and would love to see the whole world and all its diversity in nature. If there were three natural wonders that stand out, they are the aurora borealis, tropical rainforests, and the deep sea. Until she can travel to all those places, in the meantime she’s exploring every inch of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. 

Among the many skills Carolin brings to the fellowship are knowledge in environmental and sustainability sciences, inter- and transdisciplinary science, photography, and communications. 

H2Our: Learning Together to Become a Wave

The Project
In four online workshops, 10–15 young adults from all over the world came together on water education project to examine the role of water for sustainability, understand the policy perspectives at national and at international level (Agenda 2030), revisit the old folk-tales on water, learn how to converge ideas into action on water conservation.

Project Overview
It was organized in following formats: the participants first got 15-20 minutes input by experts as a formal learning environment and then were encouraged to exchange and discuss 40-45 minutes on their own in a more informal learning environment on respective topics.

Every workshop focussed on one question/topic related to the perspective listed above. In addition to the above perspectives, potential topics/questions were:

1. How is our culture connected to the way we use and appreciate water around the world? - by including participants from different countries and cultures, including people from the global north and global south, it can be enriching to discover how different cultures are connected to the way water is used, and how those cultural learnings can contribute to the needs assessment when developing approaches to solve the problem of water accessibility.
2. How did the consumption and appreciation of water change over the years? Including the knowledge and stories of elders on how they used water and how it might have changed over time will contribute to an understanding how and why the appreciation of water is different for elders and might lead to discovering valuable stories or approaches on how to use water more sustainably.
3. How can we assess water quality with basic means? Via this step, we shall empower people by teaching them basic chemistry, so that they can use simple, over-the-counter chemicals to test various impurities that may be dissolved in the local water streams. This will vary from country to country based on the legislation and ease of access to certain, nontoxic chemicals that could be used for water testing.
4. How can we contribute to ensuring access to safe water for everyone? We shall then conduct a synthesizing session where all insights from the previous workshops are put together and visualized in an interactive map or other data visualization tools. The project will end in a small online campaign highlighting facts and scientific and social information on the topics.

Project Action Steps

1. Identify & confirm experts on the topics
2. Identify and invite people to participate
3. Receive and confirm their applications
4. Mobilize participants
5. Develop interview guidelines
6. Conduct interviews (audio, visual, text, etc.)
7. Compile results from the interviews
8. Test and agree on programs for visualizing results
9. Conduct four workshops within 2 months (One workshop every second week)
10. Post workshop evaluation and impact assessment