Environmental and social justice advocate Miguel Luna joins the 38-member board as a Los Angeles representative, succeeding Jesús Quiñonez, who served since 2006. Luna is president of Urban Semillas, a Los Angeles-based public relations firm specializing in community outreach and consensus-building with a focus on social and environmental justice issues. Over the last 20 years, Luna has worked on various master planned projects, including the Lower LA River Revitalization Plan, LA River Master Plan, Southeast LA Arts Festival and Metro Los Angeles River Path Project.

In the decades since engineers first blanketed the Los Angeles River with concrete, working-class communities along its armored banks have struggled with blight, poverty and crowding — unintended consequences perhaps of an epic bid to control Mother Nature.

The virtual Summit,“Ensuring Equitable Involvement in Regional Water Planning,” was held over three half-day sessions (October 8, 13, and 14, 2020) for attendees to share strategies for engaging Tribes and marginalized communities in regional water management, as learned through local implementation of the Proposition 1 Integrated Regional Water Management (IRWM) Disadvantaged Communities and Tribal Involvement (DACTI) program.

Luna was 8 when he came north from Colombia with his mother. Theirs was a monthlong journey via plane, ferry, taxi and bus. On the final bus ride, his mother told him to sit away from her and pretend to sleep — no matter what happened. When night fell, two men got on the bus and took his mother.

Miguel Luna, de Urban Semillas, presenta varias opciones que funcionan para la conservación del agua. Dice que estas acciones, aunque parecen pequeñas, son de gran utilidad para el medio ambiente.

Words like watersheds, climate change, and sustainability are part of lessons and quizzes in our classrooms today. Some charter schools have even made the environment and sustainability the focus of their studies. The Law has even stepped in to ensure that all children in our state (California) have a chance at being exposed to environmental curricula.

"All of these projects need people to monitor whether they're doing well, whether they're meeting goals of capacity and quality," Luna says. He was already teaching young people to monitor local water quality. Why not have them monitor these projects for a living?