RISHI Projects
Project RISHI at UCLA is committed to creating lasting change through our diverse campaigns and programs. While we maintain a clear mission, we employ a broad range of strategies to address critical issues within the South Asian community, including water sanitation, healthcare, and women's and community empowerment.
Learn more about our initiatives and get involved yourself.
Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene
About Our Project
Access to clean drinking water and safe sanitation is a human right that is fundamental to community wellbeing and health. Our Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (W.A.S.H.) team seeks to identify barriers that may challenge the availability and management of potable water resources, as well as promote culturally informed hygiene education and practices. Currently, our team is creating a hygiene curriculum for students in Vadamanappakkam as a sustainable, low-cost means of long-term disease prevention. The W.A.S.H. team is also building a needs assessment framework that can drive culturally responsible and locally informed data collection to accurately identify ways to increase access to safe, quality drinking water resources within rural communities. Throughout our project planning, our team also initiates partnerships with NGOs in Tamil Nadu to broaden our access to community insights, and amplify our impact.
Community Water Assessments
In past conversations with community members and leaders, we learned about potential impedances to accessing safe drinking water in Vadamanappakkam. Not knowing if challenges to potable water access arose from quality, quantity, or management of local water infrastructure, our team began building a community water assessment plan to survey how drinking water was stored, purified, and distributed throughout the community. Such surveys involved mapping communal water infrastructure, conducting water quality tests to understand bacterial presence, survey community members about common purification methods, and learn from the local panchayat office about routine cleaning of communal water tanks. Local stakeholders were surveyed to understand the prevalence of water-borne disease throughout the community, and if local drinking water sources were instigating health challenges. We carried out data collection in conjunction with EcoPro, a Tamil-Nadu based NGO committed to promoting sustainable Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene services throughout rural India and learned how to evaluate our data through culturally responsible and locally informed frameworks.