Invitation E-mail

Attachment C: Invitation Email

From: CLS Staff

To: [EH Director]

Subject: CLS Water Policy In-person Interview

Dear [Name of EH Director],

As you know, approximately more than 44 million people (>14% of the U.S. population) rely on private wells or other federally unregulated drinking water systems for their supply of drinking water. These systems are not regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and there is no comprehensive national program to test the safety of the water they supply to drink. On the contrary, community water systems are regulated by the SDWA and have water quality monitoring programs in place to ensure that drinking is safe.

ChangeLab Solutions (CLS), in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)/Environmental Health Services Branch (EHSB) would like to conduct in-person interviews to collect information from state and local environmental health practitioners regarding safe drinking water policy development and amendment. CLS specializes in drafting model policies, providing analysis and recommendations on environmental change strategies, developing training materials, and offering technical assistance to support policy reform efforts. We plan to make these guidance documents available to State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial (STLT) Health Departments to help enhancing their drinking water programs. This project is funded through a Cooperative Agreement with the CDC.

CDC would like to interview 3 EH practitioners from your health department who participated in projects of the CDC-funded EHS-Net Water and PW/UDWS cooperative agreements. The 3 EH practitioners include you, the EH Director, the principal investigator (PI) of the project(s), and an additional EH practitioner, of your choosing. If you choose to participate, we ask that you please notify the project PI and respond to this email with the name and contact information of the additional EH practitioner you have chosen to participate in the interview.

The purpose of these interview is to 1) Understand the influence of water projects on policy, specifically, understand which water projects influenced which policies and how; 2) Identify challenges to influencing policy through water projects and strategies for overcoming challenges; 3) Understand the type of partnerships needed to facilitate policy development; 4) Identify the benefits gained to the local communities from the water project; and 5) Identify training and resource needs of STLT staff working on water projects.

Information collected from the interviews will assist CDC in the identification of gaps when STLT health departments develop safe drinking water policies, and help the CDC to develop and disseminate guidance to enhance the delivery essential environmental public health services for STLT drinking water programs.

Additionally, collecting this information will help EHSB assess what strategies were useful to address safe drinking water policies during the conduct of previous CDC-sponsored water projects. The guidance documents will include and reflect the best available science and practice, and complement the description of the work done by including lessons learned, best practices, activities, accomplishments, and recommendations. These guidance documents will integrate environmental health, epidemiology, and safe water data in user friendly way. The guidance tools may form the basis for the potential development of “How-to” guides for other agencies interested in replicating successful safe water interventions that include policy and regulation changes. 

This interview is estimated to require no more than 75 minutes of your time and that of your staff. 

Please note that any identifiable information about the respondents (name, position, agency, phone, and email) will be removed when the results of this assessment are aggregated for analysis. Individually identifiable state responses will be kept secure and will not be shared with participants of this assessment or any other entity without your authorization.

In an effort to help prepare you, we’ve included the interview questions for your preview in the attached document. A staff member from CLS will reach out to you in the coming weeks to schedule a date and time for the interview.

Please, contact Heather Lewis with CLS via e-mail ([email protected]) or telephone (510­302-3342) if you have any questions in the meantime. We appreciate your time and attention to this matter.

Sincerely,