Communities for Clean Water

Communities for Clean Water (CCW) is a coalition of Indigenous, Land-Based, and conservation organizations who work together to safeguard clean water in the Rio Grande watershed. Our mission is to ensure that community waters impacted by pollution from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are kept safe for drinking, agriculture, sacred ceremonies, and a sustainable future.

CCW focuses on the following programs to stop community water pollution downstream from LANL:

1.              Watchdogging Toxins that Migrate from LANL

2.              Legal Action & Public Policy to Protect Community Waters

3.              Coalition Building & Public Awareness Creation

4.              Preparing Youth to Become Leaders of Change

To accomplish these goals, CCW works to ensure that public meetings are accessible and held amidst a culture of silence and exclusion. We continue to assert cultural relevance within public meetings and hearings through our community organizing. We advocate for language inclusion, meeting accessibility in rural, low-income communities, government-to-government consultation with tribal nations, and policy change that is protective of those most vulnerable instead of centering institutional, scientific, and environmental racism.

The coalition is led by a Core Council of leadership representation. For the past several years CCW has identified the goal of growing our Core Council. We believe that expanding our Council will help us learn new ways of thinking about our work and will help us reach new stakeholders and communities. In FY2023 we hope to expand our group by the addition of 1-3 new organizations, each of whom is Indigenous-led and well versed in the history of contamination in New Mexico. 

As a coalition of organizations, we actively work to support each other in the nonprofit sector while accomplishing our water protection goals. This includes engaging in objectives such as 1) broadening CCW’s representation and impact to increase diversity in demographic populations represented in decision making; 2) building capacity in the nonprofit sector by helping one another build our own capacity in technical proficiency and cultural competency; 3) continuing to build links between cultural health and ecosystem health in our community organizing and policy advocacy; 4) continuing to achieve goals in respect to environmental justice and health equity; 5) creating an intersectional approach to environmental and social justice that acknowledges the bond between humans and the natural world and is responsive to Indigenous and Land-Based cosmologies; and 6) empowering community members to voice their concerns and vision for a healthy watershed and ecosystem.