The Language of Water

For more than 30 years, Minni Jain has been working with communities to regenerate their lives and landscapes. As Co-founder and Operations Director of the Flow Partnership, she works on spreading community-led, simple, successful, low-cost, traditional wisdom and methods of holding water and managing floods and droughts. To share and make available these community methods of landscape water resilience at a ground level, she has helped set up practical Water Schools in Africa, India, and Europe both as online forums as well as on ground community Water Hubs. To enable communities worldwide to resource their water projects, she has helped co-found the One Pond Fund. Minni was born and brought up in the Himalayas in India and now lives in the UK. Philip Franses has always wanted to bridge the gap between theory and actual on-the-ground projects capable of restoring the vital water cycle. Philip is the Strategy and Innovations Director at the Flow Partnership—an NGO that works with partners to rejuvenate landscapes and counter the increasing threat of floods, droughts, soil erosion, and habitat loss at their source—which he co-founded in 2012. Encouraged by the transformative success of community projects, Philip applied skills from an earlier fifteen year software career to help create the Water Schools platform for water literacy and supporting community actions. Through the multiple projects he is engaged in, he is also pursuing ways to make wealth a community and ecological currency. Philip studied mathematics at New College, Oxford, UK and teaches Holistic Science—the science of inherent interconnectedness allowing intersectional qualities to become manifest and expressed in practice. His book, Time, Light and the Dice of Creation (Floris Books, 2015), focuses on rediscovering this balance in the weighing of experience, understanding, and action.