Drowning Prevention Has the Tools. Now Let's Use Them.

I have been in this field for over 3 decades, and I have never been more convinced that we are at an inflection point.

The knowledge exists. The practitioners are dedicated. The tools: behavioral science, environmental design, data analytics, and community partnership are more sophisticated than they have ever been. What I see now, in rooms, conferences, and working groups across this sector, is a growing readiness to ask the harder questions. To challenge old assumptions. To build something bigger than what came before.

That readiness is worth celebrating. And it’s worth naming what it asks of us.

What Got Us Here and What Comes Next

For decades, drowning prevention has built on a foundation that is genuinely solid: swim instruction, public awareness, community education. These efforts have saved lives. The practitioners who dedicated their careers to this work did so with real skill and deep commitment, and the field is better for them.

But something is shifting. The most energized conversations I’m part of now aren’t just about doing more of the same. They’re about asking what the next generation of impact looks like, and whether the frameworks that served us well in the past are sufficient for the challenges ahead.

Other public health disciplines have navigated this kind of evolution before. Road safety moved from blaming drivers to engineering safer roads. Tobacco control moved from lecturing smokers to regulating the product and its marketing. Falls prevention moved from telling elderly people to “be careful” to redesigning environments. In each case, the shift wasn’t a rejection of earlier work. It was an expansion, a broader imagination about what the problem actually was and what tools could address it.

Drowning prevention is ready for its version of that expansion.

The Opportunity Inside the Funding Conversation

Walk into almost any gathering of drowning prevention professionals and the conversation will eventually turn to resources. Municipal aquatics teams talk about budget constraints. Nonprofits talk about grant cycles. Private operators talk about margins. And honestly, the resource challenges are real.

But here’s what I’ve also started noticing: the most effective practitioners I know have found a way to have the resource conversation and a different conversation at the same time. They’re asking not just “who will fund this?” but “what can we build with what we have, right now, together?”

That shift in framing changes everything. It transforms a conversation about grievance into a conversation about agency. And in a field where the cost of waiting is measured in lives, that transformation matters.

The mixed-sector structure of drowning prevention (municipal, nonprofit, private) is often framed as a complication. I’ve come to see it as an asset. Three different funding streams mean three different levers. Three different audiences mean three different points of access. When those sectors stop negotiating about who owes what to whom and start asking what they can build together, the range of possibilities expands dramatically.

What Personal Investment Actually Looks Like

Here is something I believe deeply, and it has taken me years to say it plainly: the people who are building something new are the ones who decided not to wait for permission or funding before they started.

I don’t say this to minimize the very real inequities in who has resources and who doesn’t. Those inequities are serious, and we should take them seriously. But I’ve watched people with far fewer resources than they deserved build extraordinary things, because they decided that investment in their own growth, their own ideas, their own work was not a reward to be received after proving themselves. It was the condition for proving themselves at all.

That mindset is available to everyone. And when it spreads through a field, the field accelerates.

The practitioners I most admire aren’t waiting for industry to sponsor their development or for governments to prioritize their programs. They’re showing up, investing in themselves, building credibility through action, and then attracting the support that scales their work. Build first, attract second. That is how transformative work actually happens.

The Arguments Worth Having

There are some genuinely productive debates worth naming. Here are the ones I keep coming back to.

On messaging: Awareness campaigns have been a cornerstone of drowning prevention for generations, and they’ve done real good. But communication research across public health consistently shows that awareness alone doesn’t change behavior, especially for low-frequency, high-consequence events. The opportunity isn’t to abandon communication. It’s to make it smarter: behaviorally grounded, audience-specific, embedded in moments of actual decision-making rather than broadcast into the general air.

On swim instruction: Swim competency is essential. Full stop. But the drowning data suggest that formal swim instruction, on its own, doesn’t explain the full pattern of who drowns and where. People drown in bathtubs, in calm water, during supervision lapses that last seconds. There’s a rich set of behavioral, environmental, and contextual factors that swim instruction alone doesn’t reach, and getting curious about those factors, rather than defensive, will take us further.

On equity: The drowning data has long identified which communities bear a disproportionate burden. Black Americans. Indigenous communities. Immigrant families. The sector has named these disparities, and now the work is to match the urgency of the naming with structural interventions at scale. That’s harder. It requires different partnerships, different funding logic, different measures of success. But it’s exactly the kind of challenge a mature, confident field rises to.

On environment: Some of the most exciting work in drowning prevention right now is happening at the intersection of design and public health — asking not just how to change swimmer behavior but how to change the environments swimmers move through. Pool design. Open water access. Built environment decisions that affect who swims where and how safely. This isn’t niche thinking. It’s the frontier.

The Hard Work of Honest Self-Examination

There is a concept in organizational psychology sometimes called paradigm entrenchment: the way established fields can become so invested in their dominant framework that alternative approaches struggle to gain traction, not because of bad faith but because the infrastructure (curricula, credentials, funding categories, conference programming) was built around the existing model.

Naming this is not a criticism. It’s an observation about how institutions work, and it applies to virtually every field that has existed long enough to build infrastructure. The question is whether confidence and curiosity exist to examine those defaults. In drowning prevention, increasingly, they do.

The researchers proposing environmental interventions, the data analysts questioning campaign effectiveness, the designers rethinking pool environments rather than swimmer behavior: these are no longer outliers. They’re increasingly part of the mainstream conversation. That’s a sign of a field in healthy motion.

The Questions That Will Define the Next Chapter

A sector willing to build on its own foundation while expanding it asks questions like these:

What does our evidence tell us that our current interventions don’t yet address? What would it look like to take the built environment as seriously as we take individual behavior? Are our metrics measuring effort (lesson enrollment, campaign reach, awareness scores) or are they measuring the outcomes we actually care about? Who has drowning prevention not yet served well, and what would it take to change that? And are we investing enough in our own growth, as practitioners, organizations, and a sector, to deserve the outcomes we say we want?

These questions are not comfortable. But they are generative. And a field that can sit with them, not defensively but with genuine curiosity, is a field that is growing.

The Way Forward Is Already Being Built

Here is what I want to leave you with.

The work is not starting from zero. Decades of progress in swim education, community outreach, epidemiological understanding, and professional infrastructure have created a foundation that almost no other country (USA) in the world can match in certain respects. The people in this sector, the aquatics directors, the nonprofits, the researchers, the advocates, are among the most mission-driven I have encountered anywhere.

The next chapter isn’t about starting over. It’s about building on that foundation with a broader imagination: more tools, more partners, more willingness to question what’s working and what isn’t, more personal investment in making the field better.

Drowning kills hundreds of thousands of people every year globally. It remains one of the leading causes of injury death for children in nearly every country on earth. It is not an intractable problem. It is a solvable one, with more tools available now than at any point in history.

Everything needed to rise to that already exists. The momentum is here.

So stop waiting. Invest in yourself, in your ideas, in each other, and get to work.

What’s the conversation you’ve been waiting for this field to have? Start it.

Written by Nathalie Martin, Founder of the Swim Global Project