Our History
Founded in 2006 by a small group of competing water and wastewater design-build firms, the Water Collaborative Delivery Association, formerly known as the Water Design-Build Council, has grown to become a leading professional association serving a diverse array of industry experts, practitioners, suppliers, and owners.
Initially focused on advancing design-build methods as an “alternative” to the traditional design-bid-build approach, our name, the Water Design-Build Council, reinforced our commitment to advancing best practices in design-build methods of project delivery in the water and wastewater industry.
As industry practices have continued to evolve, and industry members have embraced a broad spectrum of project delivery approaches, including fixed-price and progressive design-build, P3, and CMAR, we have expanded our focus to advance best practices across this evolving spectrum. To strengthen understanding of these methods, support our mission, and reflect our evolving membership, we recently changed our name to the Water Collaborative Delivery Association and adopted the tagline Better Projects, Together.
Since our inception, WCDA has helped thousands of industry practitioners successfully adopt collaborative delivery solutions through its education, research, and advocacy. Thanks in part to those efforts, collaborative delivery is now the fastest-growing form of project delivery in the water and wastewater industry, with 12% of total spending (approximately $5 billion annually) allocated to collaborative delivery projects.