Volunteer: Toward a Water Commons: Building a Policy + Cultural Platform for Hydroclimate Whiplash in Los Angeles

About the role

Climate House is developing Toward a Water Commons, a multidisciplinary, transnational research project to identify policy opportunities to reclaim water as a common resource. The project begins in Los Angeles where we’re exploring how Los Angeles could develop a more distributed, ecological, and publicly legible relationship to water in an era of increasing hydroclimate volatility—prolonged drought and extreme heat punctuated by intense rainfall, flooding, and rapid shifts between scarcity and abundance.

We are seeking a small research cohort to investigate five distinct areas that will form the intellectual foundation of an initial policy platform:

• LA Watershed Policy History: A political-ecological history of watershed alteration, flood control, channelization, aqueducts, paving, groundwater, and environmental justice, with attention to how these systems contribute to hydroclimate whiplash.
• Rainwater Capture + Reuse: Policy landscape, precedents, advocates, barriers, and opportunities for capture/reuse as a water-management strategy.
• Depaving + Dechanneling: Policy landscape, precedents, advocates, barriers, and opportunities for infiltration, stormwater management, and reconnecting urban systems to watershed processes.
• Living Infrastructure: Research on watershed restoration, wetlands, pocket parks, green infrastructure, and related approaches as functional water infrastructure.
• California Environmental Flows Framework: Analysis of CEFF concepts—including functional flows, timing, magnitude, duration, frequency, and rate of change—and their potential relevance to an urbanized LA watershed experiencing hydroclimate whiplash.

Each volunteer will focus on one primary research track, contributing approximately 2–5 hours/week for up to 12 weeks. Researchers will work independently while sharing findings across the cohort.

Deliverables

• A concise research brief for the selected track, including:
  • Key policy, scientific, and historical research
  • Relevant LA/California policies, programs, agencies, and funding mechanisms
  • Precedents, projects, and community initiatives
  • Organizations, advocates, researchers, and practitioners already working in the area
  • Key barriers, gaps, and potential policy leverage points
  • Relevant arts, cultural, design, or social-practice precedents
  • A short synthesis identifying promising opportunities for further development by Climate House

Research should prioritize existing scholarship, organizations, projects, and practitioners. Findings will contribute to the Toward a Water Commons policy platform and related artistic, curatorial, sonic, spatial, and civic work.

Climate House US Mission

• Mythos Embodied Climate: Climate change is not the abstract, technical issue it’s often framed to be—but a universal, ambient one experienced through our bodies and daily lives. CH communicates using universal sensory language, to reintegrate our understanding of climate change as real in the felt sense, and as a core defining issue shaping everything around us.
• Universal Sensory Language: By speaking this universal language of the senses, we can communicate in a language everyone speaks and understands. This helps reframe climate as an everyone issue—providing an opportunity for the general public to reclaim their agency in understanding it and engaging with its solutions creatively, collaboratively, and meaningfully.
• Culture-First: Culture is the fabric of daily life. CH uses a broad suite of cultural tools to meet people where they are, designing programming that is audience-tailored and culture-first, recognizing this as the carrier oil for engaging with more complex topics.
• Show-not-tell: Because seeing is believing, we design programs that show, not tell. All of our programs are seared with a blueprint, grounding solutions on the experiential plane, allowing our audience to feel solutions that are so actionable, they can taste them.