FLUSH

08/04/2026

Every year, our friends at Hub read a lot of water news stories to see how the media covers our sector. Their 2025 scan is out, and the pattern won't surprise anyone who's been paying attention - water makes the front page when disaster strikes, and drought dominated the year.

A few things worth sitting with:

1) Drought was the single biggest keyword across all coverage.

2) On water safety, "drinking water" showed up in more than 1 in 4 stories, tracking federal rollbacks and state budget cuts to the programs that keep our water clean.

3) Access and affordability finally became a campaign issue, from NYC to Detroit.

Coverage still spikes around crisis and fades once the emergency passes. That framing shapes how the public (and the money) understands whether our water systems are broken beyond repair or worth fixing.

Worth a read if you work anywhere near water communications: https://waterhub.org/what-we-learned-about-water-news-in-2025/

07/30/2026

We're officially California Water Efficiency and for Water Efficiency members!

FLUSH has spent years translating water and sanitation into stories people actually act on. Water efficiency is where the technical meets the deeply local: turf rules, rebate programs, and so on. It's complicated, sometimes contentious, and rarely communicated well. But, that's the kind of gap we like to close.

CalWEP and AWE bring the research, tools, and peer networks. We bring the narrative muscle to make that work land—with utilities, ratepayers, and the policymakers deciding what "conservation as a way of life" really looks like in practice.

Looking forward to learning from this community, and to helping tell its stories.

07/28/2026

From intern to associate—and we couldn't be happier!

When Merihene Ben Said joined FLUSH, she dove straight into our Global Waters 2.0 work. Now she's stepping into an associate role, and bringing a lot with her.

Merihene works across research, data analysis, and monitoring, evaluation & learning (MEL), turning messy field realities into decisions people can actually act on. She's fluent in English and French, which widens the rooms we can work in. And she brings a gender equity lens and North African regional knowledge that sharpen how we understand who's affected, who's included, and who gets left out.

We love bringing people in, giving them real work, and watching them grow into it.

07/23/2026

Roz Palmer has been an associate of FLUSH, bringing her experience in community and stakeholder engagement to our portfolio of experts and projects.

She's stepping into a new role as Senior Consultant, Environment People & Place, at Hatch Engineering Ltd - a great fit!

We're not saying goodbye. Roz is shifting into an advisory role with FLUSH, so we get to keep her wisdom in the room while she builds something new. We are proud that our people can move between organizations and keep our connective tissue intact.

06/29/2026

We're in Scotland! And got to see one of the oldest known toilets in history, maybe!

Check out our video about Skara Brae Prehistoric Village Orkney, Scotland and where they think the toilets were.

06/18/2026

Our June newsletter is out — and it's a full one.

Research, associate spotlights, a conference in Edinburgh, and a question we asked back in 2021 that the sector is still catching up to.

Check it out: https://www.itsflush.com/so/c9PxHJGjR?languageTag=en

06/16/2026

What is the real costs of running public toilets? Most have no clue. We tend to obsess only over what it costs to build it.

As Throne lays out in this great thought piece, most cities can't even find the operating cost numbers. Cleaning labor disappears into citywide janitorial budgets. Repairs get absorbed into line items covering everything from park benches to sprinklers. Paper goods vanish into general supplies. The spending is scattered and impossible to isolate, which makes justifying the costs science fiction to most.

We love where Throne lands: this isn't a failure of intent. It's a failure of structure. Good intentions aren't the bottleneck - predictable cost structures are.

That's why we're such fans of Throne Labs' work expanding sanitation access across US cities. Worth a read! https://zurl.co/pTOiJ

06/11/2026

FLUSH's Founder had the honor of judging this year's World of 8 Billion Student Video Contest by Population Education !

The challenge is hard because, in one minute, students connect global population growth to a real-world issue and propose a workable solution with global context. This year, the topics were Energy, Wetlands, or Economics.

The students did a really great job and showed genuine creativity in how they shared their stories. It was a reminder that it's not impossible to translate a complex problem into a story people actually understand. This is the contest's 15th year, with over 35,000 videos of creative stories having been made!

Congratulations to every winner, finalist, and participant. Thank you for the reminder of why this work matters. 🌍

Get inspired by past World of 8 Billion video contest winners! Check winning videos from middle and high schoolers on the topics of Energy, Wetlands, and Economics from our 2025-2026 contest here.

06/09/2026

The for Water Stewardship (AWS) 10th Global Water Stewardship Forum is happening in Edinburgh, UK, in late June, and we'll be there!

How we frame water shapes where the money, attention, and political will go. Stewardship is a key part of how FLUSH approaches water. It's a risk AND an opportunity, and community engagement, armed with data, is key to ensuring it is one and not the other. Connecting the data to the decisions, and the decisions to the people they affect, is a key stewardship activity.

If you're going to be in Edinburgh, we'd love to find a coffee or a quiet corner to compare notes. What are you hoping to take away from this one?

Drop us a line or comment below — let's connect before we're all there. ☕

06/02/2026

5 years ago, we co-published research on who actually leads the global sanitation sector. The answer wasn't surprising, but clarifying.

We analyzed publicly available data from 100 organizations. Our findings revealed that older white men from high-income countries occupy a significant number of leadership positions. Additionally, we found that BIPOC women are the least represented group across all categories we measured.

One finding that hurts: white individuals were 8.7 times more likely to hold leadership roles across multiple organizations simultaneously. The same faces, the same rooms, the same decisions, made thousands of miles from the communities those decisions affect.

That research was written to name a problem, in hopes to inspire action.

Our co-author Euphresia Luseka from Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) recently shared a new publication celebrating 50 African leaders in water and sanitation — work she told us was directly inspired by what we found in 2021. That's the kind of ripple effect you hope for but rarely get to see.

It's shifting! The full blog + links to the original research here: https://www.itsflush.com/post/update-2021-diversity-research