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CRPE's CAMPAIGNS
The Rural Poverty Water Project:
Helping Communities Secure Healthy Drinking Water
CRPE Organizer Susana DeAnda and residents of Ducor strategize for clean water. |
The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment recently launched
its Rural Poverty Water Project. The purpose of the Water
Campaign is to assist local communities in the Central Valley in
having a larger voice in creating local water policy for their
areas. Valley communities face extreme difficulty in securing safe,
affordable water, contamination from agricultural
chemicals and natural minerals. Many local water districts are
dominated by corporate agricultural interests, which have long
treated rural communities as their own private serfdroms.
Historically, CRPE has been active on water quality issues in
many communities. We helped residents of the barrio of Smith’s
Corners in Shafter connect to city water after they had been forced
to drink contaminated well water for years. We fought herbicide
spraying on the Yurok Reservation. We challenged dairy farms near
Corcoran which would have contaminated local water supplies.
Brent Newell and allies announce CRPE's lawsuit against the state water board. |
CRPE is currently working with individual local communities in
Alpaugh, Ducor, and Tuleville around water quality and water quantity
issues. CRPE will work to unite these different communities facing
similar issues and connect them with similar communities throughout
the Central Valley to find common overall solutions. In Alpaugh,
CRPE’s client group Committee
for a Better Alpaugh (CBA) is conducting a feasibility study to identify and purchase water
purifying systems for all the homes in town to remove the unhealthy
amounts of arsenic found in the drinking water. This groundbreaking
community protection initiative was funded by the Women’s
Foundation of California.
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