Creating Community Involvement for Water Quality Improvement
Presented by: Sheree Stewart, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality

The Oregon Drinking Water Protection Program is structured around citizen involvement at the local level. In fact, it is a required element (through state rules) of developing an approved Oregon drinking water protection plan for any size community. It is a required element because the success of the program is dependent upon citizen engagement in efforts to protect their local sources of drinking water. Public water system operators and government agency staff simply cannot affect change without this citizen involvement. Through workshops and presentations over the past four years, significant issues have been raised through direct feedback from Oregon citizens. The specific suggestions and insights from the public will be highlighted in this presentation.

This presentation also will focus on the answers to several key questions: 1) Why is community involvement absolutely essential to our efforts of improving and protecting water quality? 2) How do you motivate change? 3) What motivates community members to get involved? 4) What values and interest-generating principles might we use to engage the public’s interest in this issue? and 5) What new perspectives and environmental education tools can be used to promote interest in water quality and create behavioral changes? In discussing the answers to these questions, several technical issues will be covered which make community involvement essential in achieving water quality improvements and protection, such as contaminant risks and reporting limits. This presentation will incorporate two Oregon case studies to illustrate how certain tools were successful in motivating community involvement and affecting change in behavior at the local level. Some of the techniques that will be discussed to generate public interest and commitment, include media articles, flyers, “peer appeals”, field trips, festivals, and presentations to the local community citizens.

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