Food & Water Watch Joins With Campuses Across the U.S. to Launch First Annual Campus Day of Action
2009-10-13
Contact:
Kate Fried, Food & Water Watch (202) 683-2500
Food & Water Watch Joins With Campuses Across the U.S. to Launch First Annual Campus Day of Action
Washington, D.C.—Today, the national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch joined with 11 colleges and universities around the U.S. for the first annual Campus Day of Action. The event connects the work of students around the U.S. in their efforts to educate their campuses and communities about the benefits of choosing to drink tap water and the environmental, social, and economic drawbacks of bottled water. The Campus Day of Action is an extension of Food & Water Watch’s Take Back the Tap campaign, which works with campuses and restaurants around the country to help them replace bottled water with tap water.
“Food & Water Watch is delighted to collaborate with these schools to help them get the word out that bottled water is a waste of money and natural resources, and a blight on the environment,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “The Campus Day of Action is significant in that it connects the individual efforts of each student group to a broader movement, and illustrates that resistance to bottled water is not only a local issue, but a full-fledged, national trend.”
Institutions participating in Food & Water Watch’s Campus Day of Action included: American University, Arizona State University, Chico State University, Cornell University, Duke University, Humboldt State University, Northern Arizona University, Pennsylvania State University, Portland State University, St. Mary’s College, and the University of Washington. While activities to promote the day of action varied, highlights included the installation of bottle-free water stations, tap water versus bottled water taste tests, drives to eliminate bottled water from campuses, and screenings of the documentary films Blue Gold and FLOW: For Love of Water.
In some cases, activism extended beyond campus to the broader community. Such was the case at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, where students appealed to local administrators to ban the purchase of bottled water with municipal funds.
Food & Water Watch’s Campus Day of Action complements the work of activists around the world for Blue October, an international month of action to challenge corporate control of water and to protect water as a shared resource available to all. Blue October commemorates October 31, 2004, when the people of Uruguay voted to amend their constitution to recognize water as a fundamental human right. This change now guarantees that piped water and sanitation be available to all Uruguayans, banning for-profit corporations from supplying these essential public resources.
Food & Water Watch is a non-profit organization working with grassroots organizations around the world to create an economically and environmentally viable future. Through research, public and policymaker education, media, and lobbying, we advocate policies that guarantee safe, wholesome food produced in a humane and sustainable manner and public, rather than private, control of water resources including oceans, rivers, and groundwater. For more information, visit www.foodandwaterwatch.org.