Follow the Water attended the Hydrosocial Stories mini-conference at PSU, part of a growing partnership between the clean water outreach campaign and PSU (Courtesy of Alida Cantor).
Portland State students aren't just studying water — they're helping tell its story. Through an ongoing partnership with the clean water outreach campaign, Follow the Water, PSU students are creating social media content that reaches well beyond the classroom.
Now several years in, the collaboration amplifies diverse student voices while giving the outreach campaign new ways to engage the community around the region's most vital resource.
The partnership began in 2023 with Alida Cantor's Water Resource Management course, where undergraduate and graduate students developed original content on water-related topics of their choosing. Cantor met Roy Iwai at a conference, and a light bulb went off. Iwai leads the Clean Rivers Coalition, a voluntary collaborative partnership of more than 70 organizations dedicated to amplifying the "voice of water."
Follow the Water — the first statewide clean water outreach campaign launched by the coalition in 2022 — needed content. Cantor had students who could create it.
Students in the Water Resource Management course learning about the green stormwater infrastructure on campus (Courtesy of Alida Cantor).
Students have enjoyed the assignment so much and wished they had more time to dig into their topic that Cantor is devoting more of the course to it this term. Their Follow the Water content will now be tied to a research paper as part of a larger final class project.
"Students are often asked to do assignments that no one outside their professor reads, so they've been excited for the opportunity to make something useful that has application in the real world," said Cantor, a professor of geography in the School of Earth, Environment & Society.
Projects, and their accompanying Instagram posts, have explored water myths, groundwater, salmon health and dams, water policy, pesticides — the list goes on.
Etosha Terryll, who graduated with a master's degree in urban and regional planning, focused on the watershed around her own home, creating a short comic that traces the journey of rainwater through her downspouts and nearby drains.
"I thought it would be accessible to people beyond the classroom, as most everyone lives in a structure that deals with rain and water runoff," she said. "It made me think more about how I'm connected to the water cycle and how the built environment intersects with and changes how it flows."
That kind of creative, accessible content is exactly what Follow the Water values about the partnership.
"Getting a mix of voices, a mix of content — stuff that's unexpected and a little different — has been great," said Guenevere Millius, whose marketing firm leads the strategy for the campaign. "Having an outlet for people to share their curiosity and their knowledge and the drive to make change has been really good for us and good for the students."
Not every project makes the cut and some posts require more revisions than others, but the student-produced content consistently gets top engagement.
"I think they get a lot of likes because they're student voices," Iwai said. "It's not just professionals like myself who've been in the business for a long time talking about these issues; it's young people saying 'This is interesting' or 'This is cool.'"
Millius says students are also developing skills that will serve them no matter their career path.
"They're taking theoretical, sometimes abstract ideas and turning them into things that other people can understand and connect with," she said.
Follow the Water has also been able to repurpose previously created content from Professor Melissa Haeffner's Human/Nature freshman inquiry classes. One class, for example, wrote profiles of Oregon counties and the different water challenges being tackled around the state as part of the Oregon Water Stories project — ideal material for long-form blog posts that expand the campaign's reach beyond the Portland metro area.
Last spring, when Cantor, Haeffner and linguist Janet Cowal hosted a mini-conference integrating art and science around water issues, Follow the Water was there to capture it all.
Alison Hopcroft, who manages public agency partnerships for the Institute of Natural Resources, says collaborations like this are central to PSU's mission.
"It's letting knowledge serve the city. It's place-based education. It's giving students real-world skills," she said. "This is something that's scalable and could be replicated."
Water is also a topic that reaches beyond the sciences, touching disciplines as diverse as history and literature — and Millius hopes more PSU departments will get involved.
"It all comes together around our relationship with water," she said. "Anything rooted in this region that explores the relationship to water and sparks curiosity or connection is something we're interested in."