In high school, Maddie Duda identified herself as a people person above all else. Years later, she finds herself working with disadvantaged communities in the San Francisco Bay area to assess their needs first hand by speaking to communities in person, specifically on issues related to water.

“I do research for an environmental non-profit called the environmental justice coalition for water and I’m working on a program called the disadvantaged community involvement program [DACIP]… The program itself is to help include communities that have historically not been represented in water-related decision making.” Duda said. “We do outreach in those communities to help understand what the water-related issues and priorities are in those communities and then to collaboratively come up with solutions with those communities to address them. So doing a bay area wide assessment then helping those communities get involved in future IRWM [Integrated Regional Water Management] decision making processes. I primarily do outreach and research and working with a lot of our data partners to essentially make sure the social science part is prioritized…”

The San Francisco Bay area where Duda does most of her outreach has a large difference in wages within very close proximity to each other, this creates issues when decisions are made for funding amounts in each area. Duda’s role is to make sure no one is overlooked.

“Depending on the area you’re looking at, there can be very very wealthy communities next to very very disadvantaged communities but the average might make it such that the disadvantaged community might not qualify for funding just because of the line you’ve drawn around them. Another goal of this program is to essentially help figure out what better indicators but household income are for water-related disadvantage in these communities in the bay,” Duda said.

Duda is one of two people working on this project, so her role is very open-ended and includes lots of decision making including collaborating directly with partners.

“A lot of my day today is collaborating with outreach partners who we’re contracting within different communities throughout the bay who actually undertake and conduct a broad sweep of outreach activity as well as help collect data for needs assessment. Then [I work] with data partners on the methodology on eventually the analysis of that data. For right now because it’s a first-time program there’s a lot of decisions to be made so it’s a really exciting time to be a part of it,” Duda said.

Understanding what other people need is a big part of Duda’s job, so instead of taking an educated guess or even sending someone else, Duda works in the field often to speak with disadvantaged communities in order to get a grasp on what their realistic needs are.

“There’s the chance that if you go in with a set of questions you might not ask the questions that get at the issues,” Duda said. “Going in open-ended and then making sure we’re open to understanding what their top priorities are and then leveraging the funding that we have to best address those or finding other funding that maybe isn’t water related if our funding can’t address a community’s top needs.”