WaterNow Alliance is thrilled to announce a new partnership with the Arizona Community Foundation’s Water Innovation Challenge. The Water Innovation Challenge will award a prize to “a collaborative team in an Arizona community that develops the most innovative and inventive market-based, technological or entrepreneurial solution to advance the sustainability of its water future.”
The winner of the Water Innovation Challenge will not only receive the $250,000 prize purse, but also up to $50,000 in technical assistance from the WaterNow Alliance to support and accelerate the development and implementation of their winning solution.
According to the Arizona Community Foundation:
The New Arizona Prize sponsors formed the partnership to help ensure the winning team has the resources and support to successfully launch and take their program to scale. “We are thrilled to have formed this partnership for the benefit of the winning team and ultimately, for the benefit of our communities when the winning innovation comes to fruition,” said Steve Seleznow, president & CEO of the Arizona Community Foundation, the lead organizer of The New Arizona Prize. “We believe in the power of strategic collaborations to achieve the best possible outcomes, and this is a great example. By uniting our prize funds with the WaterNow Alliance’s expertise, the winning team will be well equipped to make their proposed solution a reality.”
At WaterNow Alliance, we organize our work in to three buckets – Projects, Policy & Partners. This new collaboration brings together both our Projects & Partners work to further unlock opportunities for sustainable water strategies.
The WaterNow Projects program was designed to demonstrate efficacy of the solutions that exist and provide replicable, scalable models for communities facing similar water challenges. Central to the New Arizona Prize is this exact idea of scalability. The winning community must demonstrate that their idea, pilot or shovel ready idea has the potential to be repeated and hopefully implemented in communities across Arizona.
Partnerships are baked in to our DNA. We know that in order to fully address the magnitude of the water crisis, we’re going to need to work across sectors and with a wide range of organizations, governmental agencies, foundations and individuals. This new partnership is setting the tone for what is possible when we come together.
We’re excited to bring our expertise to the winning community to help jumpstart innovation. We can’t wait to see the impact this Water Innovation Challenge has and the change it can bring to the winning community in Arizona, and beyond.
Team registration is now open at wic.newarizonaprize.org. Only one representative of each team needs to register by July 15 at 10 a.m. Teams will have until August 12 to submit their applications and proposals.
Tia Lebherz is WaterNow Alliance's Communications & Outreach Manager. As a born & raised Californian, she is passionate about advancing sustainable water solutions across the west and building a more resilient future for the region she loves.