Access to healthy and affordable water

Community Water Center 

Spitfire partnered with the Community Water Center, an advocacy organization working to end the water crisis in California, to host a full-day, hybrid, bilingual communication training to help local anchor organizations build concise and compelling messages about the growing necessity for safe, equitable drinking water in the San Joaquin Valley.

Together, we designed a training session in Visalia, California, for 20 representatives from eight local anchor organizations: Community Water Center, Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability, Self-Help Enterprises, Central California Environmental Justice Network, Circulo de Hombres, Sultana Community Services District, Madera Coalition and Allensworth Community Services District. 

We introduced Spitfire’s premiere messaging tools (Message Platform and Message Box) to help participants craft both foundational and tailored messaging to motivate priority audiences to act on specific water-related issues across their communities (e.g., drought, clean/safe water access, affordability, community representation, etc.), including local and regional policymakers, community leaders, peers, advocates and San Joaquin Valley residents. Participants left the training with top-line messaging to deploy immediately in their communities.

In addition to providing a bilingual coach from the Spitfire team, we worked closely with a local interpretation consultant, Linguistica Interpreting and Translation LLC, to design a training session that ensured full participation from Spanish-only speakers, English-only speakers and bilingual speakers. We deliberately arranged the room to allow for collaboration among all participants and foster a sense of community. Linguistica further provided in-person and virtual interpreters for the duration of the training as well as technological support (i.e., headphones, speakers, Zoom translation lines) for all participants to use in the room or virtually.