H2O for Life Fellowship Kicks Off With Alumni Speakers!
On December 14th, H2O for Life kicked off our 4th year of our high school fellowship program. We’ve gone from 10 fellows in 2021 to 42 fellows in our cohort this year! The movement that we are building is growing and the youth are learning ways to take action to solve The Global Water Crisis. We couldn’t be more excited!
This year we decided to include in our kickoff some of our alumni who could speak about their experiences as fellows over the years. Adlih, Alyamama, Camila, and Mariah all participated as fellows and our now supporting the next cohort.
Adlih is from Dallas, Texas. But she spent her summers in a small pueblo in Mexico where her family was originally from. In her application, she wrote about her experiences witnessing water being shut off at a certain time at their home, having to walk to collect water, and how the growth of American demand for certain agricultural goods was pushing local farmers to overuse the community’s water resources. Last year, she along with a couple of other alumni, had the opportunity to attend the U.S. WASH Convening where she helped facilitate during the youth panel breakouts and advocated on Capitol Hill for a bi-partisan bill, the WASH Access Data Collection Act. She is now attending the University of St. Thomas to study social work. She received a full-ride scholarship after writing an essay about her experience in the H2O for Life Fellowship program and was our Water Ball Speaker Last Year.
Alyamama, or Aly as her friends call her, is a rising senior in New York. She is a determined advocate for human rights. In her application essay, she shared her experience of visiting her family in Yemen. There she witnessed how water scarcity and poverty were impacting the people from her community. She called us before she even applied for the fellowship program to learn more about how she could take action on The Global Water Crisis. We know that she is going to go on to do big things! This year, a whole group of students from her school’s Key Club applied to be in the fellowship together. She is already organizing her community, not even a year after her time as a fellow.
Camila met us at the LEAD Conference, which is for Student Council and National Honor Society students. She stood out immediately as an inquisitive and big-hearted person. Although many of our fellows joined us from the United States, Camila zoomed in from Costa Rica. Her project supported the implementation of a WASH intervention, not just at one, but two schools in Nicaragua. This year she will be attending the National Student Council/NHS Conference again. But this time she will be speaking alongside us during our session! She has gone from being an audience member, to a fellow, to a leader building up the movement!
Mariah is someone who takes iniative when it comes to solving The Global Water Crisis. When she applied, she wrote about how she wanted to support a project in Pakistan where she is from. She joined us zooming in from her current home in Canada where she is a home school student. During the program, she learned that H2O for Life doesn’t have an implementing partner in Pakistan. That didn’t deter her. She researched implementers, and although we technically don’t encourage youth to go outside of the implementers we have partnerships with, how can you not support someone who wants to support their own community? We still gave Mariah the knowledge and tools to take action, but she is the one who ran with them. She raised enough with her partners at Paani to build an entire well for an entire community. They even put her name on the well and shouted out the fellowship program. We couldn’t be more proud of her!
These are just a small group of alumni who shared their stories. There are dozens more alumni. And again, 42 new fellows who are eager and ready to change the world with us this year! We can’t wait to see what this cohort does as we move into 2025!