Everhart Gearing, Alexandra2024-03-132024-03-132023https://hdl.handle.net/1813/114351Small towns and communities in under-resourced areas often struggle to build, maintain, fund, and operate resilient drinking water treatment infrastructure that meets their needs. Development practitioners often supply technology and infrastructure without addressing the need for community engagement and education, workforce training, secure funding sources, and long-term operation and maintenance plans. Often the infrastructure does not provide the level of service a community needs by not adequately treating the source water and having a short time between component failures. The AguaClara Cornell project team comprised of Cornell University’s (CU) School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and AguaClara Reach (ACR), a non-profit organization focused on bringing safe drinking water “on tap” to developing areas, are looking to implement their water treatment technology in Puerto Rico (PR) while keeping this holistic mindset for what true implementation of new technology looks like. This report provides context for working in Puerto Rico, a summary of Puerto Rico relevant work conducted thus far by the Cornell AguaClara Program, and a prospective roadmap of next steps for implementation of ACR technology in Puerto Rico. The summary includes the author’s work on the application for a National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator grant that supports the development of a convergence framework to expedite the deployment of equitable water systems, especially for those most impacted by climate change. The grant application proposes a three-pronged approach for developing this framework that includes Governance & Finance, Resilient Treatment Technology, and Community Education & Workforce Training. ACR and its partners plan to follow this approach when implementing water treatment technology alongside a community.en-USAttribution 4.0 Internationaldissertation or thesis