October 23 – 24, 2024
Baltimore, Maryland
One Water Leadership Institutes are an exclusive opportunity for US Water Alliance members to learn from sector-wide leaders, gain in-depth knowledge, and put new skills into practice alongside peers from across the country.
Our nation’s water utility workforce serves communities, supports environmental health, and is essential to thriving local economies. Despite being a stable, mission-oriented industry offering family-sustaining jobs with opportunities for wealth-building, many utilities face a current workforce quantity and quality crisis. A massive wave of retirements is depleting employee ranks and leaving critical jobs unfilled, with an additional one-third of the workforce eligible to retire in the next decade. Irreplaceable know-how is at risk of being lost rather than transferred to the next generation of utility workers. The current water workforce composition also reveals gender and racial disparities. Addressing these complexities requires water leaders to think and act differently than in generations past.
Co-hosted in partnership with Baltimore City Department of Public Works and WSSC Water, this One Water Leadership Institute creates space for established and rising professionals across the Alliance network to explore local and regional workforce strategies and gain tangible takeaways for building a strong and equitable water workforce. The US Water Alliance’s recent report, Toward a Strong and Equitable Water Workforce, reveals a key insight: the biggest wins come from collaboratively designed, multi-pronged approaches rather than any one utility policy or program. Participants will have the opportunity to learn from our co-hosts’ emerging regional water workforce collaborative. They will also network and build relationships with peers and leaders from across the sector, discuss innovations to build talent pipelines, hone their own One Water Change Leadership capacities, and apply these principles to their workforce development journey.
One Water Leadership Institutes are free of charge for US Water Alliance members. Two breakfasts, two lunches, a networking dinner, and an optional site visit are included. Attendees are responsible for lodging and transportation to the host city. An Alliance member organization may request registration for up to two individuals.
