Isla Urbana

With the Prize money, we could:

- Expand our work in the Huichol community in the states of Nayarit and Jalisco; we have worked with this community since 2010, and we expect to reach full water coverage in the coming years (we have now installed more than 200 rainwater harvesting systems).

- Reach full rainwater harvesting coverage at a household scale in the town of San Juan Tlacotenco, state of Morelos; around 80% of houses already harvest rainwater.

- Expand our knowledge and internal capacity to implement rainwater harvesting at a landscape scale, taking courses and training, and buying materials and machinery.

- Reach full water autonomy in San Juan Tlacotenco through rainwater harvesting in the landscape, harvesting more than 25,000,000 liters yearly.

- Develop and start implementing "2year challenges", a program which we wish to create, that aims at transforming communities' relation and access to water, as well as fighting desertification, through integrated rainwater harvesting projects and different scales (household and landscape).

- Work on institutional strengthening in our nonprofit's project management board; a lot of new projects are coming through our nonprofit, and we need more and better internal capacity to manage them.

My name is Enrique Lomnitz, I was born in Mexico City to an immigrant family and was raised between Mexico and the US, where I studied Industrial Design, after which I returned home with the goal of getting my city to start harvesting rainwater. For the past 11 years, I have been working in communities on the outskirts of the city and in remote rural villages, installing and teaching people to use rainwater harvesters. I have founded and worked with several projects, Isla Urbana being the main one, focused on sustainable development for marginalized communities, through rainwater harvesting in homes and schools. My life and work are focused on the intersections of sustainability, poverty, water access, and community. I am an Ashoka fellow, MIT Tech Review Innovator, UBS Global Visionary, and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. My goal is to make a significant contribution to sustainable development in my country, and to create sustainable water management models in all contexts, from rural to periurban to urban.

Isla Urbana seeks to solve a problem of worldwide consequence that has tormented Mexico for decades: how do we sustainably supply water to the population, and close the inequity gap with those persistently left behind.

Over 10 million people in Mexico, and 780 million worldwide, lack access to any water supply infrastructure. In Mexico City, over 250,000 people have no connection to the water grid, and millions more receive intermittent, often polluted water, a few days per week or less.

Grossly unsustainable management practices, population growth, disregard for marginalized groups, and a lack of innovation and creative thinking in infrastructure have put the city in a deep crisis, landing it on the list of the worlds 10 most likely to run out of water.

Ironically, Mexico City is built in a naturally water-rich area. It was founded on an island in a vast lake, and receives an abundant 300-500 inches of rain per year. Yet for 400 years, infrastructure projects have focused on draining the lake, and immediately channeling the rainwater into a combined sewage system that flushes it out towards the ocean. The result is a desiccating landscape, collapsing aquifers, and less and less clean water for the population. 

Our project seeks to detonate and promote the widescale adoption of Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) in Mexico City, and the country as a whole, in order to build sustainable and resilient water access, capable of reaching places where conventional water supply models have so far failed.

Our innovation comes from working on several fronts: designing and installing RWH systems adapted to the varied social and architectural contexts found in Mexico; working directly with water-scarce communities, teaching how to harvest, treat, and store rainwater; creating content and communications initiatives to place RWH in the public imagination and agenda; working with universities to study and research RWH best practices and potential; and working directly with local and state governments to design and implement RWH programs and policy.

Much of our work involves getting RWH on the public agenda, and then designing and/or implementing programs, in collaboration with local governments and foundations, that install rain capture systems in homes, schools, and landscapes in highly water-precarious communities, teaching the population to use them effectively, and then supporting them over a few years in order to firmly establish the knowledge of best practices and ensure long term adoption.

Our project is based on maintaining a close understanding of the realities the communities we work with face. The project was founded by myself and a small group of people who went to live in a water scarce, low-income neighborhood in the south of the city, where we lived for several years, collaborating directly with our neighbors to fully understand the realities of living without water, and to design RWH systems adapted to that context. Since then, our goal was to make Mexico City the Capital of the Rain; we have now almost achieved that goal, having installed more than 20,000 systems in houses and schools. These systems provide free, clean water for all uses (human contact and even drinking) for 5 to 9 months a year, reducing stress, expenses, efforts, and increasing overall quality of life in the families and communities it serves. Well maintained, they last for decades! 

Our project still focuses on this goal, but is working to broaden its impact with through larger scale, integrated water management models that rely on the same techno-social basis, but seek to have a better understanding of water dynamics at a landscape and regional scale.

We are directly serving around 125,000 people around Mexico. These people are direct users of our RWH (rainwater harvesting) systems installed since 2009. They enjoy the benefits of an autonomous, clean water source for all purposes during 5 to 9 months each year (depending on the storage capacity they have; some families can live off of harvested rainwater year-round), most of them in their homes, some of them in the schools they attend or other communal buildings. Indirectly, through the public policy we have developed, an additional 54,000 people are being served with systems derived from our design and methodology.

In one year, we hope to have served directly between 7,500 and 10,000 additional people (135,000 in total), through new RWH systems installed in homes, schools and other buildings, but also through our novel landscape rainwater harvesting projects, which are set to impact entire towns with more centralized, bigger infrastructure. We are currently working in the town of San Juan Tlacotenco, bettering the existing infrastructure to be able to capture 9 million additional liters of rainwater in the landscape. If we succeed, this town of 2,500 people will enjoy this water as of the month of December 2021.

We measure our impact in terms of:

• number of systems installed
• number of families and people harvesting the rain
• liters of harvested rainwater
• water trucks substituted
• quality of the harvested water
• time saved by beneficiaries through water accessibility
• amongst other indicators related to SDGs

And their outcomes:  

Our goal is to change people’s relationship to water, improve their access to it (especially when it comes to low-income families) and improve its quality, and be a part of the development of sustainable communities and a responsible use of natural resources, taking water as a starting point.  

For this, we take into account the number and quality of our strategic collaborations, as well as relationships with local water committees, the number of local technicians gaining skills, experience and new work opportunities through our projects, and the dignity that access to water can grants to individuals.  

We also work towards public policy and market detonation; this impact is already visible in Mexico City. We expect to reach other regions in 2021 and upcoming years (for starters, the states of Nuevo Leon, Jalisco, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, and other countries like Chile and Panama).

Finding enough funds to keep financing long-term projects through our non-profit is a serious challenge. Further, we are in deep need of an institutional strengthening and need to hire an administration employee.  

There are also practical obstacles, like drug cartel violence (we have cancelled many trips to the Huichol community because of this). The Covid-19 pandemic has been a similar challenge, given that entering isolated communities can represent a threat for them as well as our team.  

To overcome these barriers, we have a set a team that constantly applies to funds and created a systemized methodology for it. In practical matters, we have security and health protocols and constant monitoring to ensure the team’s safety when attending projects (help from the communities to give us safe passage, constant communication, and rescheduling cancelling trips).  

Winning the Prize will enable more funds to be allowed to specific projects in rural and indigenous communities, boost the creation of our new Landscape Rainwater Harvesting department (broaden our training, acquire tools and materials, train our installers, hire employees), and it will allow us to have a better infrastructure for fundraising and management in our non-for-profit, increasing the security of our projects.

One of Isla Urbana’s main goals is to spread awareness about rainwater harvesting within society, making people more and more conscious about existing nature-based solutions and their benefits and large-scale impact. Media campaigns are the main channel through which we can show positive impacts of this practice, increasing demand amongst individuals, but also making this solution much more visible for decision makers. Additionally, targeted communication is one of the best strategic ways to catch government’s, institution’s, and diverse funds’ attention.  

Although Isla Urbana already enjoys some brand recognition, the growing market represents a tough challenge when it comes to winning projects. Working continuously on brand recognition will help us remain one of the main references when it comes to social rainwater harvesting projects.  

Our communications team has done a great job creating a fanbase; but it needs more! Sustainability is becoming trendier than ever, and enlarging our fanbase and followers would definitely enable new, more visible projects around Mexico and abroad. At the same time, this will allow us to show our new projects (like landscape rainwater harvesting) and attract new ideas and experiences.

Our board of directors is 50-50 men and women, one Afro-Mexican, one American, three binational Mexican-Americans (including myself, who am also Jewish), and one Central Mexican.  

Three partners grew up as subsistence farmers, three in middle or upper middle-class US and Mexico, one on a cattle ranch, and another in a working-class part of Mexico City. We came together because of shared goals and worldviews, and complementing skills, not intentionally curated diversity, but we are very proud that our team is a cross-section of Mexican society. We believe our diverse backgrounds allow us to understand, connect, and empathize, with the equally diverse clients and beneficiaries we serve.   

About half our employees come from the low-income, water scarce communities we work with. Most of the rest come from middle class families throughout Mexico.  

Though we’ve tried, it has proven near impossible to find women interested in becoming installers, which is culturally a very gendered line of work in Mexico. This is the area where we are unhappy with our team’s diversity. That aside, we believe we have built a truly diverse and welcoming space in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, and national origin.

Isla Urbana was founded by myself and fellow Mexico City native, Renata Fenton, out of a desire to make a tangible contribution to the adaptability of our hometown in the face of a clearly deteriorating water supply situation.  

We came to believe Rainwater Harvesting held significant promise after deep research into the history and current state of our city’s water resources, and from a great amount of time spent in water-stressed areas. In 2009, we installed a pilot system in one such neighborhood, in the home of a family we had grown close to. The results greatly exceeded our expectations.  

Seeking a deeper understanding of life in water-scarce communities, and close feedback from users, I moved across the street from our pilot system. The team grew from there, developing RWH technologies and implementation models in close collaboration with users.  

Today, our team includes people from across the spectrum of Mexican society. Three partners, and half of our employees, are from water scarce, low-income communities we serve. We are uncommonly able to work and connect across all sectors of this hugely diverse, often stratified society, combining intimate knowledge of reality on the ground, with access to thought leaders and decision makers.

We started Isla Urbana with the specific mission of developing sustainable water access for Mexico City’s periurban communities. After years developing projects at increasing scales, we were asked by the government to create a city-wide program.  

We poured ourselves into it. We designed the technology and implementation model, trained over 200 installers, built the government’s operating team. We executed the launch, installing 10,000 systems in one year.  

Once everything was running, the contract was suddenly given to a company with no traceable resumé or online presence. Inside contacts said it was a political favor that needed to be payed, we were collateral damage.  

Unsure how we’d survive, we convened the full team and laid out the situation:

We had put all our efforts into a single project, and lost it. We needed to reinvent ourselves, diversify, find new work. We had funds to make payroll for three months maximum.   

The team worked like a ship’s crew in a storm. Within two months, projects started materializing. 16 months later, we are working dozens of projects throughout Mexico, and launching pilots in three new countries. Our mission now is to get sustainable water to as many people as we can, everywhere.

Ciudad de las Ideas (City of Ideas) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7SfI7fNBeE

Innovators Under 35 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcj7Vy3FGeA

TEDxTlaks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmOFIc10_jM

ADN Opinión (news program) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmOFIc10_jM

The Hunger Project Transformative Leader - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8PsNtMQFdY

Creative Mornings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEL1XVWiXiI

H2O Mx (documentary film about Mexico City’s water crisis) - https://vimeo.com/103780777

Weekly participation in the radio program Atando Cabos with Denise Maerker - https://www.radio-en-vivo.mx/podcasts/atando-cabos

National Geographic 2020 Emerging Explorers - https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2020/09/28/announcing-the-national-geographic-societys-2020-class-of-emerging-explorers/

HBO Latino - Héroes Cotidianos, La Cosecha (Daily Heroes, The Harvest; teaser in the link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM9VhBiUA5s

Our Environmental Education Department works mostly pro-bono, and getting funds for these activities within the RWH projects is very difficult, even when their impact is non-neglectable. With the Prize’s money we could finance, strengthen and enlarge this department, and integrate its activities in many projects.  

Winning the Prize will allow us to complete our first Landscape Rainwater Harvesting project in San Juan Tlacotenco, reaching full coverage in households, harvesting around 18 million liters in the landscape with 3 reservoirs, and purifying the water with constructed wetlands. Completing this first project is key to gain experience and create our Landscape Rainwater Harvesting Department and start offering our services, for which we also need funds given that these projects are often very costly, and their need is mostly evident in low-income, isolated areas.  

Our program Rain Schools (https://islaurbana.org/escuelas-lluvia/) uses donations and other funds to address public schools, many already on our water list. We could use some of the funds to address them.  

Our non-profit’s management needs an urgent reshaping to be able to cope with the diversification we are currently engaging (projects are increasingly financed through our non-profit), so we would use these funds for a global institutional strengthening.

State Government of Jalisco – designing and executing public policy projects in low income areas of Guadalajara

Unicef – building handwashing stations in schools

Tlalpan Burough Government (Mexico City) – installing rainwater systems in homes

City of Palo Alto Stormwater Comitee and Fundación Moisés Izkowitch   – installing rainwater systems in rural Oaxaca

Water.org – piloting credit-based models for rainwater harvesting

Fundación Gonzalo Río Arronte – rainwater harvesting in schools in the Wixárika Nation (or Huichol Nation in the states of Nayarit and Jalisco)

Cooperación Comunitaria AC- Installing rainwater systems in rural Chiapas

Softys – Piloting rainwater systems in rural Chile

Water Commission of the State of Mexico (CAEM) – installing rainwater systems in schools in the State of Mexico

Coca Cola Foundation – installing rainwater systems in low-income Mexico City neighborhoods

Fundación Sertull – implementing landscape-scale water harvesting in San Juan Tlacotencothe, State of Morelos

P&G – mentoring for scaling impact