Gracias, Hermano / Thank You, Brother

This year, AGWA starts our second decade since our founding. And we need to celebrate a transition for our co-founder. Diego Rodriguez, a senior economist at the World Bank. He and I first met by phone in July 2010, connected by a mutual friend. AGWA’s origin story begins with that call: Diego was organizing a formal group consultation on water and climate, and he needed a partner to help organize the event. A mutual friend introduced us. Diego told me that he had already been working on water and climate issues and wanted to bring together some of the leading people in the space to discuss the challenges, needs, and opportunities for bringing a realistic adaptation perspective to water management. He and I knew quite different people. About eight hours into a six hour meeting, Diego and I knew this was an organization, not just a one-off event. We needed to find a way to keep this conversation going and convert the discussion into tangible action. And thus AGWA was born. He even came up with our name.

Diego is making a transition, and I wanted to use this note as a way to thank him formally for our work as AGWA and as an individual over the past decade. Even if you know Diego, you might not know the intensity of focus he’s applied to water and climate issues, and for far longer than AGWA’s lifetime. He’s been involved, often quietly, pushing the boundaries of water resilience from projects to whole programs, at massive spatial scales, as well as working with content experts in energy, economics, and infrastructure to push the boundaries of our knowledge more than a little past where the rest of us had stopped at what we thought was a hard edge. His work has been brave, bold, and important.

That role has often been quiet as well, even when he has argued loudly for relevance and impact. He’s also been a good friend, often through really difficult times. And I am grateful to say that I know him through his family as well as through his work. I have never wanted for a mentor or friend since we met in Stockholm.

I know we will keep working together—his transition now is more of a change of state rather than of substance. And I know when the history of how we came to manage water with resilience, his name will be central to the story.

Gracias, hermano.

“Juancito” John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA