Reinventing Charity | Scott Harrison

Scott: Alright, it's great to be here. Uh, I'm gonna start at the beginning. When I was, uh, four years old, my mom almost died. I was born in Philadelphia. That's dad, that's mom, and middle class family. Uh, but when I was four, we moved from Philadelphia to this very ugly gray house. At the end of a cul de sac, in the middle of winter, and unknown to all of us, the house came with a carbon monoxide gas leak.

So we all start getting these strange symptoms, you know, migraines. Uh, on New [00:01:00] Year's Day, 1980, my mom walks across the bedroom and she collapses. So she is the canary in the coal mine. Uh, this leads to a, a series of blood tests and the discovery of massive amounts of carbon oxide in her bloodstream. Uh, my dad is actually the one that, uh, that finds the leak.

So he found the faulty furnace. He got an HVAC friend. They ripped it out, threw it on the curb. Dad and I started to bounce back, uh, with our health in the next couple months, but mom never did. So I remember as a, as a child, you know, watching my mom, this vibrant, beautiful woman, writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, become permanently disabled, become an invalid from this point on.

What happened was her immune system irreparably shut down and her body was unable to process anything chemical from this point on. So for the the next 40 some years, I never saw my mom's face again, and she always wore a mask. Uh, so I'm familiar with 3M's, uh, large variety of, of [00:02:00] facial masks, unfortunately, for four decades.

Uh, I remember that everything would make her sick, from soap to car fumes to fabric softener. The ink from books used to make her sick. And, uh, she would spend a lot of time outside. When she lived inside, she lived in a room that was covered in aluminum foil. She slept on a bed that was washed with baking soda 20 times.

So just kind of in isolation. But I just remember this one bizarre thing that she used to still want to read. So as a young kid, I would take her books and I would lay them out in the sun. And throughout the day I would turn pages and I would bake that smell of print out from the books. In winter, I would put them in the oven.

And I would take her this book that had been outgassed and I would knock on her door and she would open it, she'd be wearing a mask, she'd be wearing cotton gloves to take the book from me. And then she would close the door and she would put the book inside a cellophane bag and she could read. So this was a weird childhood.

Y'all, uh, family planning stopped. She wound up miscarrying, uh, what would have been [00:03:00] my sister. And I grew up as a caregiver and I grew up in the church. My parents had a deep and authentic Christian faith, which really helped them stay together. And I played piano with my bowl cut, uh, every Sunday. And was a good Christian kid.

I didn't smoke. I didn't cuss. I didn't, you know, I really didn't do anything except what the church and the bible said And if he'd asked me what I was going to be when I grew up I would have told you i'm going to be a doctor and i'm going to help cure my mother And i'm going to help cure sick people like her 18 happened, and I realized I was two hours away from this place, New York City.

And I just had this moment where I woke up one day and said, No, I'm not gonna do any of that. I am going to live the opposite of the rules. I'm gonna break the rules. I'm gonna live for myself. I have lost my childhood. I'm gonna go have some fun. So my first idea was to join a band, uh, and grow my [00:04:00] hair, you know, down to my shoulders.

I did that, the band immediately broke up because we all hated each other. But I moved into New York City and I learned that if you wanted to rebel You could rebel in style with this very unique job called a nightclub promoter. And all you had to do was get the right people inside the right clubs. And if you could come up with this perfect formula, you could charge people 25 for a cocktail that costs 25 cents.

You could sell a thousand dollar bottle of champagne. That only costs 40. So to the horror of my parents, I start smoking, I start drinking, I start sleeping around. I start using drugs and my goal is to become the number one nightclub promoter in New York city. Over the next 10 years, I work at 40 different clubs and I found this picture of me in a VIP room with my business partner.

And what is so sad about this photo? Is it, it reveals the condition of my soul that I think the Rolex watch needs to be [00:05:00] shown to the club photographer. Some guy I'd never even met. So I've been collecting all these markers of success, trying to date girls in the cover of fashion magazines, driving the BMW, buying the grand piano for my New York apartment.

This would have been around 10, this would have been around 3 in the morning. This would be around noon the next day. Trying to come off cocaine, ecstasy, MDMA, popping Ambien, trying to go back to sleep to wake up at 7 p. m. and do it all over again. And over these 10 years, I had turned my life into an absolute catastrophe.

I was morally Here, I won't make you look at that anymore. Uh, I was morally bankrupt, I was spiritually bankrupt, and then one day, half my body goes numb. Inexplicably. And I'm convinced that there's something terribly wrong with me. You know, maybe I have a brain tumor. Uh, maybe I have some incurable disease.

I remember my business partner's like, Bro, you smoke 40 to 60 cigarettes a day, and you do coke non stop. Like, no wonder your body's breaking down. So I go and [00:06:00] I get all the, the tests, and they, the MRIs, and the CT scans, and they Connect me to EKGs. They can't find anything wrong with me. But this is this really, uh, clarifying moment in my life where I start asking those questions about faith and about spirituality and about eternity and about legacy.

You know, did I still believe in heaven and hell at 28 years old? And if I did, you know, I was pretty sure where I was going because of the way that I had been so selfishly and, and decadently living. So this started a process to try to find my way back to a very lost faith, a lost morality. And, uh, it took me a couple months, uh, but I, I had this big idea that what if I sold everything I owned and I started life over at 28?

I, I realized a pivot. was not in order. You know, this was not a small course correction that was needed. I needed to just find the 180 degree opposite of everything that I had [00:07:00] spoken, everything I was thinking, everything I had done and start over. So I told God, I'm going to tithe one of the 10 years that I've selfishly wasted.

I'm going to go try and, you know, serve God and serve the poor and see if I could be useful. So I, I do. I sell everything I owned and I remember from a dial up internet cafe, I put in applications for 10 famous humanitarian organizations that I'd heard of to volunteer. So I applied a world vision and save the Children in Oxfam and the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.

Maybe no surprise to anybody here, I am denied by all 10 organizations. Turns out Doctors Without Borders is looking for doctors, not nightclub promoters. So I'm so upset because I've taken like this big first step of faith, I want everything in my life to change and nobody will take me. Finally, one organization writes me back and says, If I am willing to pay them 500 a month, and if I'm willing to go live in a country I'd never heard of, Liberia, West Africa, it was the poorest country in the world.

They would take me on as a volunteer photojournalist. [00:08:00] Now, I was not technically a photojournalist, but I'd put a bunch of pictures up on a blog, and, and I'd been a pretty decent writer, and I'd actually gone part time to NYU and gotten a degree in communications that I'd never used. So I dust this off, and this organization takes me.

And my life changes in the most radical way in such a short time. I go into West Africa, backed by 14, 000 United Nations peacekeepers, in a country that had just emerged from 14 years of civil war. This was the largest peacekeeping force deployed in the history of the world at that time. And the mission was a medical mission that took place on a huge hospital ship.

A 522 foot converted ocean liner that had been gutted and turned into a state of the art hospital. Very simple idea. Let's bring the best doctors and surgeons in the world. On their vacation time, and let's sail up and down the coast of Africa and help as many people get access to high quality medical care as possible.

So I'm going to be documenting [00:09:00] everything that happens on this ship, and I, I kind of realize I've got to go all in myself. I need to quit smoking and quit drinking and, and quit drugs and, you know, vow to never look at another pornographic image in my life. I needed to kind of purify myself. And there was something, you know, almost, you know, symbolic or prophetic of walking up onto this ship and sailing away to a new continent into a new life.

So I go out with a bang, I get fantastically drunk. People on the ship said I smelled like alcohol as I surrendered my, my passport. Uh, but that was it. I really turned over a new page, and for me it was easier just to quit everything in one go, and see where this new story would take me. Now I met this guy, Dr.

Gary Parker, and I was very lucky to find a mentor, to find a guide, very early on this journey. Now he was a guy from, uh, Santa Barbara, California. He was a plastic surgeon. He'd heard about this ship, and he signed up for three months. When I joined, he had been there 21 years. He never went back to his plastic surgery practice.

So I wanted to know everything about this [00:10:00] man, what a life of service could look like. And I got to spend a lot of time with him. Now, let me talk about Liberia. I could not take a picture in this country without capturing bullet holes. Everything was shot up. There was no running water. There was no sewage system.

There was no mail system. Broken. People living in bombed out apartment buildings like this. Houses that were once beautiful but had been decimated by this 14 year war led by Charles Taylor and a bunch of children. Most importantly in our context, there was one doctor for every 50, 000 people living in this country.

Here we have a doctor for every 300 of us. So if you got sick, you were out of luck. So before the ship would come into the port, we would flyer the country, looking and advertising our services for people who had massive facial tumors, or flesh eating disease, or cleft lips and cleft palates, or people who had been burned by rebel soldiers during the war.

I needed reconstruction. We'd say, Hey, turn up on this day and our doctors will try to help you. My third day in Africa. I remember we had 1500 [00:11:00] available surgery slots to fill. And I remember jumping out of bed at five in the morning, putting on hospital scrubs, grabbing my two Nikon D one X cameras and heading towards the soccer stadium.

In the middle of the city that the government had given us to screen patients. And I remember thinking, Are there 1, 500 people with these conditions? Turn the corner, there's over 5, 000 people standing in the parking lot waiting for us to open the doors. And I realized that day, we're going to send more than 3, 000 sick people home without the chance to see a doctor.

I later learned many of these people had walked for more than a month from neighboring countries, some of them with their children in tow, only to be turned away because we didn't have enough doctors. We didn't have enough slots. First child I met was this little boy named Alfred. And he was 14. And what you see here is a benign tumor.

An amelioblastoma. Now his mom was smart. She'd gotten him there a few days early. And she pulls out this photo. And says to her translator, she said, Here was my son at 10. And then this tumor starts [00:12:00] growing. And there's no doctor or surgeon to take him to, so she took him to the witch doctor. And there were spells that were cast, and chicken blood was spread on the tumor.

None of this worked. Four years later, her little boy was suffocating to death on his own face. Terrified, cause he knew that he was dying. Couple days later, I saw why these doctors had come. Why they had made these sacrifices. And Dr. Gary did an eight hour surgery on Alfred and removed his tumor. A few weeks later, I got to take him home and I got to watch him heal for the next couple of months.

So this is my job. Well, the job I was paying 500 a month for. Was like, each and every day I would go and I would meet the patients scheduled for surgery. Marthaleen, this woman told me, this tumor grew for 8 years. You can see the bottom of the frame, she has a towel. She said she would cover her face in public because people would stone her.

If they saw her face, they thought she was spiritually cursed. She needed a 40 minute, very simple surgery, just to remove this mass and give her her face and give her her life back. So that first year, I took 50, 000 photos. And the [00:13:00] cool thing was, I had a big email list. So I'm blasting thousands and thousands of people who had just been at the Prada Megastore, where I threw the opening party a couple weeks before.

And I'm sending them these stories. And, you know, obviously there's some unsubscribes at first. This isn't quite what they signed up for. But I actually realized the power of storytelling and highlighting the work of these doctors. People began to reach out and say, Can I sponsor a surgery? Can I come on the ship?

Is there anything I could do to be useful? So I finished that year. I went back for a second year and it was really in the second year at 29 years old. that I determined to get off of the ship into the rural areas and find out what was making so many people sick. And it was there that I saw people drink dirty water for the first time.

And I learned two really important things. I learned that half of the country was drinking disgusting contaminated water from open sources. And I learned half the disease in the country. was because people were drinking unsafe water and didn't have access to hygiene and sanitation. I [00:14:00] remember meeting this 13 year old girl named Hawa and it blew my mind that while I had been selling Voss water in my clubs for a decade for 10 a bottle, she had been coming to this water hole and this was the only water she had ever known in her entire human life.

And the crazy thing was, she was living on top of an aquifer of clean water. And I saw a small group come in, and train a bunch of locals, and build a well in her village. And that left such an impression on me, watching a child go from poisoning herself, to clean water. So I remember showing these photos, and what I was seeing to Dr.

Gary, and at the end of my second year, He was sending me back to New York and he says, listen, we don't need more doctors. We don't need more people like you to raise money for this ship. Why don't you go and give everybody on earth clean water? I remember saying, whatever you say, Dr. Gary, I mean, he could have told me anything and I would have done it, but he knew that I had, I'd unlocked something that I could be passionate about.

And at the end of the second year, it was that simple. I said, I'm going to come back and I'm going to try to use the rest of my life to bring clean water to [00:15:00] every human being alive on planet earth. That was 17 years ago, and sadly, while we've made some progress as I stand here today, there are 703 million people drinking disgusting water around the world.

A tenth of the world is drinking dirty water today. It's two Americas full of people. 82 percent of these people live in rural, remote areas, and if you were to come with me, and I've now been to 72 countries, I've been to Africa more than 55 times, you would see things that would shock you. You would see a kid like John Bosco, wading knee deep into brown, viscous water, and then drinking it.

You would see a girl like this in Honduras, walking up in the morning, waking up in the morning and just taking water from a river that ran right in front of her home. You would see kids like this poisoning themselves in real time. You'd see kids and cows sharing the same sources, knowing the kids are drinking fecally contaminated water that is destroying their insides, but it's all they have available.

I remember meeting [00:16:00] this little girl in Kenya. We came up to her village and she would drink from this bottle. It was from the Molo River. And she would drink from this bottle, then she would vomit. Then she would drink a little more, and then she would just kind of sputter it up. And it would dribble down her shirt.

I remember watching with our group in horror, we took the water away from her. Promised to try to find a solution for her village. But I want to know what was in the water. So I put this in the car, and I put it in my bag, I didn't exactly tell them at customs. Then I gave it to a lab in New York City. And they put it under a microscope.

And they sent me a video of what she was drinking. I remember the lab said, we're not experts in all the different kinds of waterborne disease, but you sent us water that is alive. No child should be putting this in their body. So I travel around village to village. Women will show us the leeches in their drinking water.

They'll say, hey, you know, we filter out the water. The big ones are never really a problem, but sometimes these little leeches will get inside our body. And then they grow up and they stick to the back of our throats and the back of our children's throats. We've heard now in dozens and dozens of villages, parents will [00:17:00] often give their kids a little bit of diesel fuel to drink, to kill the leech, because the alternative is prying it off with a stick and then it just crawls back up.

Again, probably something no one in this room has ever, in a million years, associated with your water, with your drinking water. But a huge problem if you weren't lucky enough to be born into the 90 percent of the world that enjoys this every day. Huge link between water and education. One in three schools in the world not only don't have water for the students, they don't have toilets.

Imagine sending your teenage daughter to a school with no toilet, no water. Most of the girls stay home four or five days every month. One of the top reasons why girls drop out of school. And then instead of being educated, instead of leading their communities forward, they're just walking for dirty water.

Six, seven hours every day with 40 pounds of water on their back. That's not even helpful. Last thing I'd say is it deeply impacts women and girls. In all my travels around the world, I have never seen men get water. Whether I'm in Africa, Asia, India, Central and South America, it is always the [00:18:00] role of the women and the girls to go get the water.

And we see moms digging in the sand. Like this woman here. These women told me they were most afraid of crocodile attacks at this fast moving river. And then they named several women who had come here for water and were dragged off and never seen again. They built that kind of brushy structure at the top as a tell, as an early warning system for crocodiles.

If that started moving they would scurry off. Imagine risking your life and then this is the water that you bring home to your children because it's all that's available. So that's a huge problem. It's a human problem. It's also a completely solvable problem. And what's great about this is that there's not a single person alive we don't know how to help.

We are not scratching our heads saying, Oh, I don't know how we'd help that community get water. We know how to help solve this problem in its entirety for every human alive. We haven't created the will to solve this problem. We haven't mobilized the resources. [00:19:00] Instead of solving the problem on Earth, Elon is looking for water on Mars, 142 million miles away.

Noble? Extraplanetary life? But we just haven't said, Hey, we think we should probably try to solve this problem. Now, a lot of different things work in a lot of different environments. We're solution agnostic. We now have 14 different technologies across the portfolio. Sometimes, it's as simple as bringing in about a million dollars of drilling equipment and drilling a well, finding the clean water underneath the village.

Now, what the community doesn't have access to is the million dollars of equipment. They don't have access to the skilled hydrogeologists who know how to find the water. But we can bring that in. It seems too simple. At that same school I showed you earlier with 2, 000 students on top of a massive lake of clean water.

Took three days to give the entire school clean water. When kids see water for the first time, they always rush the drilling rig. They're, they're splashing, they're laughing, they're dancing. Tasting water for the first time in their life. In Cambodia, there's a lot of water, [00:20:00] but it looks like this. So the solution there is bio sand filters.

We now have the largest bio sand filter program in the world. Think of this as a giant Brita filter for your family that you make yourself using local sand and gravel and rock. Dirty water goes in the top, 99. 5 percent of all the contaminants come out of the bottom. Water's safe enough for everybody here to drink.

In the Thar desert of Rajasthan, we can't drill and there's no surface water, but the monsoons come and it rains really, really hard one month a year. So what we do there is we work with the locals to build underground rainwater harvesting cisterns so they can capture one year's worth of rain in that month, filter it.

And then pump off the grid when a community gets one of these systems, they get 40 to 45 percent of their income back instantly because they're spending so much money buying water and the height of the dry season we have, I guess the slogan at Charity Water. Water changes everything. And if you just think about [00:21:00] it, it so dramatically touches all aspects of human life.

Water radically impacts people's health. We've gone into villages. We found a year later, 82 percent reduction in disease. I was just at a school in Uganda. 150 girls enrolled in the 12 months after the Water Project was built at the school. Water improves education. Water gives time back to women.

Hundreds of millions of hours are wasted by women every year going for unsafe water. And when a woman gets clean water near her home, we hear of amazing stories of entrepreneurship. This woman, Postina, she bakes these delicious donuts. She earns an extra income now, and she uses that money on school uniforms.

There's a lot of data that's come out on the economic impact of water and sanitation. Every dollar invested yields four to eight times. It's a local comma, the local community. Obviously, there's some money on health savings, but the biggest is that time turned [00:22:00] into productive income, into productive work.

One of my favorite stories, a woman named Helen Appio, and she was in northern Uganda, and, and she was one of the first people we helped. And I remember it was a long day, and our team was visiting village after village, and when you go into a village, there's a long celebration, and there are speeches, and it takes a while.

And then you sit with the community and they express their gratitude. Well, the team was trying to sneak into this kind of fifth village unannounced and just observe the well and just see how it was impacting people's life. Well, you'll see Helen here in the green somehow gets wind of them coming and, uh, rallies the women and delivers a very traditional Ugandan greeting.

All right, so that took a while, but an hour later, sit down with Helen and [00:23:00] say, Helen, how is your life different now? And Helen tells us the story of these two yellow jerry cans, 10 gallons of water. And she said, I would walk for water every day. And I would bring it home, and I have many children, and she said I never had enough water, so I would make these decisions.

Do I cook today? Do I clean? Do I wash my kids bodies? Do I wash their school uniforms? Do I garden? She said, I never had enough water. And she says, as a Ugandan woman, we always put our families first. She said, now I have water feet from my house. Now I can take all of the water that I want. And she said this to us, she said, now I'm beautiful.

We didn't get it. We're like, of course, Helen. You're a beautiful Ugandan woman. She said, no, you don't understand for the first time in my life, I have enough water every day to wash my face and my body and my clothes. And she said, now I'm beautiful. She said, look at me. I'm looking so smart. She had on this beautiful green dress [00:24:00] and it just got us to think of water in a way we had never quite considered it before.

Water as the power to bring a woman dignity. And we wanted to be in the business of that. Last thing I'd say is, I've been doing this a while now. This may be one of the only things everybody can seem to agree on. No one has told me to stop. No one has ever pulled me aside and said, Let them drink dirty water.

Let the women get raped on their eight hour walks. Or attacked by animals. Let the people drink dirty water. Republicans think clean water is a good idea. And so do Democrats. So do Independents and Bitcoiners and Libertarians. People of faith, agnostics and atheists, everybody can come together around clean water.

The other nice thing is it's binary. It's not subjective. People are drinking clean water or they are not. And you know that you have massively improved someone's life if you've taken them from that to that. So I started the organization 17 years ago. 30 years old, [00:25:00] came off of the two years with Mercy Ships, I had no money, I came back, found my business partner had not dissolved our partnership and left me with a 35, 000 tax bill.

So this was not a great time to start a non profit. I started living on a closet floor for free rent, but I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to bring clean water to everybody on earth. And I had the advantage of just talking to everyday people who worked at MTV or VH1 or Sephora or Chase Bank, and I realized normal people don't trust charities.

So many of my friends love the idea of water, but they were cynical charitable organizations. I found out 42 percent of Americans pulled by USA Today said we don't trust charities. More recently, NYU did a study found 70 percent of people in America believe charities waste their money. It's like you have one job, right?

7 out of 10 people believe their donations are wasted. So I thought maybe there is a better way. And as I looked around, I said, where's the apple [00:26:00] of charities? Where's the Nike, where's the Disney, where's the, the Virgin, where's the epic, inspiring, imaginative brand. So I said to actually solve a problem this big, we're also going to need to reinvent or reimagine the charitable experience.

I had a couple of ideas. What if we could solve the problem with money? What if we could promise that 100 percent of any donation we would ever take in from anywhere in the world would go directly to build water projects and help people get clean water? Now, I had no business degree. I was a club promoter.

But I thought, well, what if I open up two separate bank accounts with two different numbers and I put all the public's money into the water account and then somehow I'm going to raise all that nasty overhead separately from a small group of visionary private donors or entrepreneurs? So that was promise number one.

We said we'll be so crazy about protecting the integrity of the 100%. We'll even pay back credit card fees in perpetuity. So if someone gives 100 in their Amex and we get 96 sadly, we would pay back that 4 that Amex took and we would send the 100 to the field. [00:27:00] Kind of quickly realized, well we've come up with a business model that's not fungible.

So we could build technology and we could track those donations. We could prove where people's money went and the impact it had. So we became the first charity in the world just to simply Put all of our projects up on Google Earth and Google Maps. So people could see the satellite images of the completed projects.

The third was just this belief that for the work to be culturally appropriate, for it to be sustainable, you know, no guy like me from New York City should run around Malawi with a hard hat, trying to pretend to drill a well. So we would go and find and identify these local organizations and we would scale them.

We would get them more drilling rigs, the money to train and hire more hydrogeologists. We would get them the support trucks. And they would be the ones leading the work in each of these countries. Leading their communities, leading their countries forward in the future. They would be the ones getting the credit.

So I put these very three simple ideas together and I'm sad to say the best idea I had to kick this off was to throw a party at a nightclub. I was turning 31, I just emailed every single person I'd ever met, I got an open bar, [00:28:00] donated for an hour. And as people came in they had to put 20 in this big plexi box.

And at the end of the night we'd collected 15, 000 and we counted it and we photographed it and we counted it again. And then we took 100 percent of it to northern Uganda where 30, 000 people were living in a refugee camp. And this was the water source. And we wish we could have done a lot more, but we had 15, 000, so we built our first well, and we fixed a couple adjacent ones.

And then we sent the proof, the photos, the GPS coordinates, back to those 700 people who gave 20 bucks. And we said, you actually did something. Here's where your money went. And that feedback loop was so pow so powerful. We realized if we could build that into the core, the DNA, the ethos of the organization, it would be a huge competitive advantage.

We launched ad campaigns where we just tried to get people to think differently about water. How would your pasta taste without water? How about Kool Aid without water? My kids would probably love this. Oh, uh, how about your water in a water in a baby bottle? Imagine a mom having to give this to their child every day.

I believed if we had edgy, compelling, creative, [00:29:00] then we would get donated media. And we just started pitching New York City, asking for buses. We pitched Verifone, asked for a thousand taxitops, Times Square billboard, network TV spots. Got millions and millions and millions of dollars of donated media. We took over exhibitions.

We shot rich people in New York City in the same situations that we were seeing people around the world. What if your mom had to drink? Dirty water with bone and hair in it, like this woman in Ethiopia told me. What if your kids went to a private school with 40 pounds of dirty water on their back? What if my banker friends had to go to Central Park in their brioni suits?

Why was this okay for other people? Partnered with luxury retailers? I mean, we were just trying to be creative. I convinced Saks Fifth Avenue to give me their windows for a month in Manhattan and let me put photos up in jerrycans and build wells inside Saks Fifth Avenue stores. So as a woman would come in to consider a 10, 000 Balenciaga bag, she could also consider a 10, 000 well.

This wound up raising a huge amount of awareness and almost a million dollars. Partnered with brands like Amex, they put us on their homepage for four months, took out a million dollar print [00:30:00] campaign. This led to the ability to work with the Apples and Ubers and some of the great companies in the world to raise awareness, to get their customers and their employees engaged in this issue.

To pay for the overhead. Lot more I could do if I had much more time. We almost fell off a cliff. We were almost insolvent, but we never broke the 100 percent model. And today, we've built a pretty sophisticated multi year, multi tier giving program for the overhead called The Well. And I went to people and said, you know, can they give on three year commitments?

Started smaller, now it's at 100 a year, up to a million a year. And I went to the founders of LinkedIn and Shopify People who had built businesses, who knew that you're only as good as the talent you can recruit and retain. And they said, we don't mind paying for your overhead. Went to people in sports and entertainment.

I don't know that Depeche Mode, Tyler Perry, and Tony Hawk have much in common except paying for Charity Water's overhead. Went to people in business, metals executive, Goldman Partners, fashion executives, and said, will you help us? This is the most sacrificial giving. Today we have 130 [00:31:00] families across 30 countries who make 100 percent model possible.

We invite about 10 new families in every single year. Tried to innovate in fundraising. This is a fun campaign. We just laid out all the materials. In a 10, 000 well. So we'd say to somebody, you write a 10, 000 check for a well in Ethiopia. This is what we're doing with 100 percent of your money. You're buying pipes, you're buying PVC.

You're buying 192nd of that drilling rig time. But if you give us 10, 000 for a project in Cambodia, it buys a completely different set of materials for a completely different intervention. Trying to connect people to their money. We made the first VR film in the space over 10 years ago. They didn't even have VR cameras.

We got 8 GoPros donated. We put them together, made a VR rig, and we took it to Ethiopia, and we filmed an 8 minute video of this 13 year old girl getting clean water for the first time in her life. So people would put on the headset, and they would see her at the swamp. And then a couple days later, the rig came into her village, and they watched her and her father.

Standing by as they found water and on the last day, the sixth day, she walks down to the [00:32:00] well and she drinks clean water for the first time. We showed this to people, they would take the headset off, they would be weeping. I thought, what if we debut this at our gala? So we, uh, we're doing a gala that year at the Met, and in black tie after dinner instead of serving dessert, we served 400 VR headsets.

And we strapped them on, everybody, and we pressed play, and we took everybody to Ethiopia for eight months, uh, eight minutes, and then when the film was done, we just asked them all for money, and they gave a couple million bucks. The week before, I had flown in just for one day to show her, Salam, the finished film, and told her how her story, we believed, would inspire tens of thousands of people to be generous, to help other 13 year old girls like her.

She said, konjo, in her beauty, in her language, which is beautiful. At the end of the film. Try to innovate in water. Try to solve this problem with broken wells. You know, as we did more and more of these projects, ours were all new, but we would see broken wells around the world. And we learned this was a huge problem.

Not only are 700 million people living without water, there's 2 billion people. [00:33:00] that are relying on fragile water systems. And 25 percent of these projects around the world are broken, but nobody knows which 25%. So we took a page from Shackleton. You remember he, he made this famous ad. Men wanted hazardous journeys, small wages, bitter cold.

You'll be in darkness. You probably won't come home. But if you do, we'll give you recognition. So we said, we're looking for people to pay their own way and go visit Charity Water Wells and tell us how they're doing. We thought nobody would apply. Hundreds of people applied. We picked these five, and this is George.

George went to Uganda. We just gave him a list of 70 GPS coordinates, that's it. Not a single dollar. George wound up buying that map and that compass with his own money. He rented this truck after he got himself to Uganda, and he went to go visit 70 wells. And in most of the communities, actually in 62 of the communities, everything was great.

But in 8 of them, the pump wasn't working. And the people were back at the same dirty water source. And we thought, we need to solve this problem. And it's obviously not going to scale, sending Georges out there. What about technology? So I'd come [00:34:00] across Nest, and I'd seen someone change the temperature of their house remotely.

And the Internet of Things was a big deal, and I thought, What if we could create a smart well? The only problem is charities have an R& D budget of exactly zero. So I went to Google and I convinced them to give us five million dollars to try to create a smart well. And I said, we, we are absolutely not guaranteed to get you any results, but this is true innovation capital.

At the time, it was the largest check Google had ever written to a non profit in the history of Google. So we got to work and we tried to create this impossible sensor spec that would transmit from everywhere and food grade plastic could take all these different readings. And we wanted to make it for 200.

We failed for about five years. This is a sensor we made that, sadly, was not waterproof. So I can talk about having one job. This one was supposed to have a battery life of ten years, and it lasted, I think, four days before crapping out. So we really just failed for five years, and we blew through five million dollars of R& D capital.

We asked them for another five hundred grand. And then, we finally, in the sixth year, came up with a sensor that works. [00:35:00] We made 3, 000 in the pilot, and this is a sensor being installed in about 10 minutes. And this is a well at a very remote part of Ethiopia. Four bolts come off, the 200 sensor goes on.

And now this is a smart, cloud connected well. And what's great is back in New York And our local partners, they can see exactly how much water is flowing every single day. They can monitor the success. All of this is open source. Now this is important. Here's an actual charity water well that broke. A woman in Zimbabwe gets the notification.

She can send out a technician on a motorbike. He works with the community. Pulls out the guts of the well. Finds the leak. Cuts the pipe. Makes the repair. Gets clean water flowing again. And we can see that that took about four days. Of downtime. So we now have the largest data set in the history of the world when it comes to real time rural water flow.

We're 17 years into this journey. Now we've now managed to raise over 800 million. [00:36:00] Thanks to the generosity. Of two million people around the world who have said yes to becoming a part of this solution We've now gone from that first well from my 31st birthday to 137 000 projects across 29 countries today We employ over 2500 locals

not everything is up and to the right, but we've innovated at different times and and figured out what got us here won't get us to the next level and Now we're raising about a hundred million dollars a year, which is a fraction of what is needed. And what's really sad is this is us and the rest of the water sector in America.

A fraction of what is needed of funding is going in to solve this problem. We've helped 17 million people get clean water. On my bad days, when I think we've done far too little, which is basically every day, I try to 17 million people. And you would have to build 938 Madison Square Gardens. So we've sold out the garden about three years in a row.

[00:37:00] Looking back, obviously this guy is gone. Dropped him off 19 years ago at the bottom of that gangway. And being able to do this work for two decades now, I've been blessed with an amazing family. It's my wife, Victoria. We worked together for the first 10 years. My kids are a little older now. My son is nine.

My daughter is seven. And eight weeks ago.

The third turned up, and I'm almost 50. This was not a part of the plan, but I just had, uh, another son, his name is Luke. And I've been able to travel around the world and invite people to be a part of this story. Now, believe it or not, Dr. Gary is still there. 40 years of service this year. He's lost his hair, he'll tell you.

But he's still showing up each and every day to benefit the people on the mercy ship. I also got to go visit my birthday well on the 10th anniversary. And it was amazing to be back at that refugee camp and see clean water continuing to flow. Over 10 million liters have flowed through a well that people threw 20 bucks in a box.

If you're interested in more of the story, I [00:38:00] wrote a book. All of the advance and the proceeds go, uh, to the organizations. People have said nice things about it, like Mike Bloomberg and Branson and Gates. And there's a lot more in, uh, the story, a lot more drama, a lot more of things we did poorly. But really, just looking ahead as I close here, you know, 17 million out of 700 million people.

It's only 140th of the work that needs to be done. It's two and a half percent, and we want to go faster. And we believe, like, water's gonna have its moment, and it means health, it means empowering women, and education, and economic growth. Water intersects with climate. Pick goal six at the UN, you get eight for free!

We tell people. It's a nine in one package. Even Mr. Freakin Beast is building wells now in Africa! He built 100 last week, so we really think it's gonna have its moment. And I really believe that together we will be and we will be able to get this problem solved in our lifetime very quickly. Three ways you could help if you're thinking, Hey, how could I be involved in this?

The first is to learn more about The well, maybe some of you are in a position where [00:39:00] your company or your family could be a part of this and join the 130 families. The second is just simply to sponsor a water project. And I'll just end with John Bosco, because this is what it's all about. Taking a kid like this, taking his family, drinking dirty, disgusting water, and then one day Because someone reaches out their hands across an ocean and says, We're going to do something for them.

Drilling rigs start heading towards his village. And he watches local Rwandan drillers jump out. They must have been heroes to this little boy. And they look for water. And a couple days later, they find it and they build the well. And he tastes clean water for the first time in his life. We got to visit him eight years later, and we found our cute, kind of anxious teenager had grown up, and he'd become a man.

And he had just gotten married, and he just had his first daughter. And this is Jean Marie. And we realized, she will never have to drink from the swamp. This cycle has been broken in her village. This is generational change. And knowing we've been able to do that in 137, 000 communities. For 17 million people [00:40:00] wants us to go faster and accelerate the impact.

I'll end there. Thank you so much for letting me share a little bit of the story. God bless you guys.

This transcript was generated with Descript AI