My journey to create EFLA involves two parallel paths. The first was having to relearn all that math I took millions of years ago when I was in middle school, high school, and college and help my daughters with questions they had on their homework. It is often thought that the practice of engineering involves a LOT of math, but in my experience that hasn’t been true. I rarely have to do much more complex calculation than add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Needless to say, I had to reach out for some on-line help to remember trigonometry, derivatives, and integrals. Thankfully, I discovered the Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/) which I personally found incredibly helpful. I really liked the structure that included resources for students, parents, and teachers as well as the simple, straight-forward way they presented their materials. The ones I looked at were short videos which walked you through the type of problem you were trying to solve. The Khan Academy saved countless hours of me pulling my hair out trying to remember how to do something and was an invaluable resource.
The second pathway comes from my own work in the field of water. I work with drinking water and wastewater systems all over the country and my work includes a wide variety of activities designed to help build their technical, managerial, and financial capabilities. One issue that comes up a lot is the fact that water is taken for granted and undervalued by customers. While it is a sign of the great success of water operators and managers that individuals don’t have to think much about their water – generally it’s always there and safe to drink no matter where you are – it’s also somewhat of a problem. If customers don’t understand the complexity of water and how much goes into providing safe water to the home and treating wastewater generated from the home, they may undervalue it and not provide the appropriate level of financial support. One way to address this problem is to provide more information to the public regarding water service.
These two paths converged when I thought about creating a Khan Academy-type website where people could go to gather information about water. The ultimate intent of the site is to have three areas of content – general public, elected leaders, and water system personnel – with easy to access and understand information. The content is intended to be provided in a neutral, fact-based manner. It is our hope to increase the overall understanding of our most precious and important resource. As they say in New Mexico, Water is Life.
While initially the content will be largely focused on water, we hope over time the site grows to include other areas of the environment. We hope to develop and serve content but we also hope to have this platform as a space where others can add their content so that it can grow to meet more needs.
The name – Environment-Focused Learning Academy – was one that took much contemplation. We were using the EF portion to play off of our organization name (the Southwest Environmental Finance Center) and the Learning Academy to address what we hope to provide in terms of an educational resource.
We have begun to place content on the website and hope you will enjoy taking a look. We will continue this effort to the extent that time and money allow. We hope you will visit our site often to see the new content.
We are always interested in constructive feedback. Please let us know what you think.
Author: Heather Himmelberger, Director of the Southwest Environmental Finance Center