Scott Harrison's Life of Pain to a Life Saving Mission

Scott Harrison was living a life of desolation and despair? Drowning in a sea of empty pleasures, his soul craved something more. Witness a powerful transformation, a journey from the depths of despair to a life-saving mission. Scott Harrison, once a high-powered nightclub promoter, unveils the dark secrets of his past and the rock bottom that forced him to confront his reality. But from the ashes rose a burning passion to change the world.

Join us as we delve into the story behind Charity Water, an organization dedicated to bringing clean water to millions in need. Discover how Scott Harrison found redemption and ignited a global movement that's transforming lives.

This is a story of hope, of finding purpose in the face of immense pain. It's a testament to the human spirit's ability to rise above and make a difference. Prepare to be inspired!

To learn more or donate, visit charitywater.org

Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships


Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.

🔗 Website: https://itstartswithattraction.com
📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimberlybeamholmes
👀 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kimberlybeamholmes

Follow our other channels!
📺 https://youtube.com/@UC7gCCAhhQvD3MBpKpI_4g6w
📺 https://youtube.com/@UCEOibktrLPG4ufxidR8I4UQ

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

On today's episode of it Starts With Attraction. We're sharing with you one of Kimberly's favorite episodes that she referenced in her 200th episode, which, by the way, is a fantastic episode, and if you haven't seen it already, you can click here and go watch it right now. But the episode that we're showing you today was actually recorded in late 2022, and it's with the founder of Charity Water, scott Harrison. This is a really amazing episode. It's one of my favorites as well, and I hope you stick around and watch the entire thing. Without further ado, let's dive into today's episode.

Speaker 3: 0:34

So, scott, how was it that you decided to start Charity Water? Where did this even come from? Well, it was definitely not a traditional path into gosh. I guess social entrepreneurship is the way you call it today, but that term didn't even exist years ago. I was a nightclub promoter for 10 years, so I had moved to New York City to rebel against a very conservative Christian upbringing. My mom was an invalid. When I was growing up I was an only child, so had a strange childhood and a caregiver role and just walked away from anything related to church or morality or rules.

Speaker 3: 1:08

When I was 18 and spent the next decade filling 40 top New York City clubs with people and selling $1,000 bottles of champagne and $25 cocktails. So that was kind of my first career, my first career, and I was really good at it. But along with that comes every dark, despicable vice you might imagine. When you go to a club at 12 and come home at noon the next day, good things don't happen. So I picked up a two-pack-a-day smoking habit, a drinking problem, a drug problem, a gambling problem, a pornography problem I mean, you name the vice and it was a part of my life. And at 28 years old I woke up one day I started having some health issues maybe no surprise because of the lifestyle and just realized, man, I'm emotionally bankrupt, I'm morally bankrupt, I'm a terrible person. This needs to change. You know, I can't continue living like this and I really missed that foundation of you know, wholesome spirituality, like foundational. The stuff that I'd been brought up with, you know, started to look a lot better 10 years in, you know, having explored the depravity and hedonism. So I got this idea to tithe, one of the 10 years that I'd selfishly wasted filling up clubs and see if I could be useful on some sort of humanitarian mission, you know, did I have anything to offer the world or others? And the first 10 organizations I applied to all denied me. It turned out World Vision was not looking for a nightclub promoter to join World Vision, nor was Doctors Without Borders or Samaritan's Purse or the Red Cross.

Speaker 3: 3:00

But I was, very fortunate. One organization eventually accepted me as a volunteer photo journalist. I was a pretty good writer as a hobby, pretty good photographer as a hobby, and I had to pay them $500 a month to go to the poorest country in the world at the time, which was Liberia, having just completed a 14-year civil war. So in some ways this was the exact opposite of my life. Poorest country in the world go broke by serving and I joined a group of Christian doctors and nurses and, long story short, the year turned into two years there.

Speaker 3: 3:42

And of all of the problems I saw in a country with no electricity and no running water and no sewage system and no mail system, in a country where there was one doctor for every 50,000 people living there, the one thing I saw that just was the most compelling for me was that people were drinking dirty water and I learned half the country was drinking from swamps and rivers and ponds and half the disease in the country was because people were drinking dirty water. And here I was, with doctors trying to make people healthy, and yet 50% of the people living in the country didn't have the most basic need for health or life, you could argue met. And after two years there I came back to New York City as a 30-year-old with my issue. I said I am going to try to make an impact in the world by getting the then it was a billion people on the planet access to clean water. That was 16 years ago.

Speaker 2: 4:46

Wow, I want to ask you a little bit more. So, going back to the 10 years that you stepped away from how you'd been grown up your faith. So was there a moment, at that end of that 10 years kind of the quote unquote day you woke up where you would come back to your faith, and what did that look like?

Speaker 3: 5:07

Not until the end of the 10 years. So it was really, you know, for the 10 years I wasn't going to church, I wasn't giving, I wasn't living any of it, I wasn't praying. I mean there was no spiritual life at all. And in this kind of you know, few month period where I had, what happened was I woke up one day and half my body went numb and I thought that I had a brain tumor or Parkinson's disease or something terribly wrong with me. And I said, well, what if I was going to die, like in a few weeks or in a few months? You know what would my life have meant? And the answer was nothing. My tombstone might read here lies a club promoter who got a million people drunk and that's the only thing that I'd done.

Speaker 3: 5:50

So that started the journey back to exploring churches, to reading the Bible again, to praying. My dad sent me a book called the Pursuit of God by a theologian named Tozer. I mean I was reading kind of deep theology while doing cocaine at night. I mean this was definitely a push pull for a period of months. And you know, I just I realized how much I missed that faith, the belief, and maybe the life of virtue seemed a lot more enticing when you'd lived a life of vice or of decadence.

Speaker 3: 6:30

And you know, I remember reading the Bible again as a 28-year-old and like Jesus was a lot more badass than I remember. You know he was not religious, he was kind of, you know, thumbing his nose to the religious establishment of the day. You know all the people who insisted and enforced all of these rules. So maybe the God that I experienced in the text at 28 was very different than the one that had been fed to me. You know, through a conservative Baptist or assemblies of God.

Speaker 3: 6:58

We went to so many different churches but it was much more rules-based. It was much more. Here are all the things that you cannot do and I think I found a much more expansive faith and I wound up not starting a religious organization. So Charity Water is not a faith-based organization. But for the last 16 years now I've been able to live out my faith in the workplace, or live out my faith through this calling of getting people clean water and letting it animate and drive me and the decisions and the culture I'm trying to create and the values by which we treat people. But again, there's no strings kind of attached to that.

Speaker 2: 7:43

Yeah, and it's not lost on me how you know you said you were thinking about what would my tombstone read here's? Here's Scott, who got a million people drunk, to the way your story has turned out now, to where it's still liquid, right, like there's still a drink. That's that's in this, but now it's water and it's life giving and it's not life taking for such. You know so much of what that nightclub life lifestyle is like, how, I mean a little bit more talk about. You were doing drugs, you were you know pornography, all those things. How did you switch your lifestyle?

Speaker 2: 8:16

Was it going to Liberia where you no longer had access. Like how did you stop some of those habits and addictions?

Speaker 3: 8:23

So I'm an Enneagram 8. So I'm very extreme, I'm very black and white, and the mission I was joining was a hospital ship. So imagine an ocean liner, a 522-foot ocean liner that has been gutted and equipped with state-of-the-art operating rooms and a hospital ward, yard operating rooms and a hospital ward. And there was something symbolic or prophetic about walking up the gangway of a ship, knowing that gangway would be brought up, and then sailing away to a continent I'd never been, to Africa and to a new life. So, if I'm honest, I got fantastically drunk the night before I joined the mission, I smoked 60 cigarettes just knowing, you know I'm going to go out with a bang.

Speaker 3: 9:09

So later, you know, people said, oh, this, this new volunteer from New York city. He turns up dressed in black. You know he stinks of alcohol and cigarettes. You know who is this guy.

Speaker 3: 9:22

But but you know, for me it was a clean break. You know I, I never touched Coke or any of that stuff again. I never looked at a pornographic image again. I never gambled again. Um, never had another cigarette again. Um, I like wine and craft IPAs, so that's, I don't know that it's a vice anymore, but you know I, um, I really just said you know I'm never going to do this stuff again and it was a clean break. And also, you know, when you're with Christian doctors, like it's not really cool to smoke, you know nobody's, nobody's down in the ward, uh, sniffing lines of cocaine on a Christian hospital ship.

Speaker 3: 9:56

So I think the culture changed and that that's really important. You know I didn't realize how important that was at the time, but the entire intention of this new community that I joined was to work out their Christian faith through service. You know, to use their time, their talent and their money in the service of others. The previous community I'd been, you know, was let's get laid, let's get drunk, you know, let's get messed up and live as much life for ourself as we can, let's accumulate as much money or as many cars or as many fabulous vacations as we can. So I don't know that I would have been able to have a clean break in my old community. Yeah, I don't think I was going to be the one guy who's standing in the DJ booth at a nightclub where I've invited a thousand people and I'm the sober guy I don't know. But it was very easy, much easier to do that in a hospital ship.

Speaker 2: 10:53

So when you two years, you do that. When you come back, do you go back to New York City. Where did you land when you got back to the States?

Speaker 3: 10:59

I do. And I went straight back to the clubs because those were the only people that I knew and I remember in those early days I'd be up in a DJ booth with my laptop open, showing them people dying of bad water, showing my pictures and some of the stories that I'd written. And yeah, I remember a couple of DJs are like bro, you're killing my buzz, like you got to get out of here. How much money do I have to give right now to get you out of my booth? Much money do I have to give right now to get you out of my booth? And I'm joking, but I had a lot of those experiences. But I was just sharing my lived experience and the world that I had seen with everybody I knew from my former life.

Speaker 3: 11:39

Now the interesting thing is, you know, charity Waters raised a lot of money now and we've grown a pretty big organization and people say, well, it's because you're like, I can't do that because I'm not a nightclub promoter and you know, I don't know all these people. None of those people gave. They were interested, but our big donors did not come from nightlife. The people who are going to get messed up every night and spray champagne are not the people typically who are giving to humanitarian causes globally. So I would find a couple rays of hope, a couple bright spots a business person here who would make another intro, but almost all of the early support for Charity Water came from outside of nightlife, not from the people who used to come to the clubs and spend lots of money on drinking.

Speaker 2: 12:29

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I heard you say in an interview you did that one of the ways you started Charity Water, when you were thinking about it, was what are the obstacles that keep people from giving? And a lot of people don't want to give because it's going to go to overhead or personnel cost. And I have a nonprofit background as well, so I understand it takes money to run an organization. But you set it up yeah, for sure, but you have set it up to where 100% of donor funds go to building the wells and then you have different donors, up to where 100% of donor funds go to building the wells.

Speaker 2: 13:06

And then you have different donors that really fund the overhead of the organization. So some questions I have about that are number one I mean it can be easy to look as an outsider now at Charity Water and say, man, overnight sensation, right, like they have so much impact. They've always been this big. Scott Harrison must have the Midas touch. Tell us what it's really been like. I mean, over the past 16 years of growing Charity Water. Was it just a phenomenon from the start, or have there been times where you've thought I don't know how to make this work, but I'm so driven by the mission I've got to figure it out?

Speaker 3: 13:45

Yeah, I wrote a book about this. I mean there were moments of near death for the organization where we almost went bankrupt, insolvent, because of that a hundred percent model. There were moments of wanting to give up. I mean there was a lawsuit early on which I wrote about in the book, where, you know, somebody sued us and basically said we want you to stop existing as an organization. So certainly it wasn't up and to the right. With no resistance. I will say we had a lot of things going for us and we had some good timing. So that 100% model you mentioned turned out kind of to be lightning in a bottle.

Speaker 3: 14:25

42% of Americans don't trust charities. More recently, 70% of Americans polled by a major university, 70% of people believe charities waste their money. So you know, the one way to kind of take the most common objection off the table is to promise people that 100%, if they give $1 or a million dollars, will go directly to the cause, in our case the direct building of new water projects that save people's lives. And we actually opened up two separately audited bank accounts. We actually open up two separately audited bank accounts. So even today, kpmg for the last decade comes in and writes an opinion on the 100% model, and to do it we need about 100 families paying all the overhead and these are high net worth families and all their money goes to staff salaries and flights and office rent and the toner for the Epson copy machines and insurance and phone bills like you know, the the nastiest overhead costs. So that then, for, therefore, millions of donors can give in the purest way. That turned out to be really what people wanted and I don't think we were sure at the time and it turned out to be so unique and so rare, because most of the time, you give money to a charity and they send you a receipt and a thank you and then they ask you for more money. You don't really know where the money went, you don't really know the impact, so that was really helpful.

Speaker 3: 15:55

The second thing was you know, social media was just happening. I mean, this dates me. I've been at this for 16 years. Social media was just happening. I mean, this dates me. I've been at this for 16 years. Okay, there was no Google Maps when I started. Okay, there was no Google Earth. Yeah, so I remember inviting myself to speak at Twitter headquarters and the company had 40 employees.

Speaker 2: 16:22

Oh wow, 40.

Speaker 3: 16:23

Like Twitter, was just a new idea. So you know we were early. We were the first charity to use Instagram when Instagram was started by Kevin Systrom. So I think you know we built a following really early on in the you know the age or the growth of social media and clean water is an issue which I'd argue is one of the very few things that everyone can agree is a good idea.

Speaker 3: 16:50

Republicans think this is a great idea and Democrats think this is a great idea and independents, and libertarians, people of deep religious faith, think this is a great idea and atheists think this is a great idea. So we had a lot going for us. We had a compelling issue clean water for humans. A transparent model. 100% of whatever anybody gives goes directly to clean water for humans. And then the third thing was really just this tech-focused thinking where, when we saw Google Maps, we said, wow, google has just created a place where we can put satellite images of every single water project we're ever going to build and show them to the public. So the tools became available to build. The most transparent charity in the history of the world, which was one of our goals, was to connect donors to their impact through a variety of tools. So I think a lot of it I attribute to timing. Now you could argue today, if you're starting a charity, you have certainly more tools at your disposal for payments and email marketing or transparency than we did back then.

Speaker 3: 18:03

But it was really putting a lot of these things together and then working really hard. I mean it was 100 hour weeks for five years. We all worked 100 hours a week. I know that's not trendy anymore, but there was no live work balance at the beginning. It's a startup. You are just trying to make sure you don't die, that the company doesn't die, the organization doesn't completely run out of money and go insolvent before you've had a chance to achieve any sort of critical mass. So it was. I remember leaving the office at two in the morning and coming back at eight in the morning, and doing that on a Saturday and doing that on a Sunday for a long time. And of course, now, 16 years in, you know the rhythm is completely different. I mean, I've got young kids and you know no one at the organization should be working. You know, 60 hour weeks, that's just not the culture today, but in those early days it was an extraordinary amount of effort required. How long have you been married.

Speaker 3: 19:05

I have been married 12 years and I married my second employee, so my wife, Victoria, later became a co-founder of the org, but she was the creative director and really helped build the Charity Water brand. Interestingly, now she teaches nonprofits how to fundraise and market and tell better stories fundraise and market and tell better stories and she's working with nonprofits in the call it million to $10 million annual budget range, trying to help them scale and get more critical mass through some of the things that she's learned.

Speaker 2: 19:40

That's awesome, that's fantastic. So you were driven together with the passion for Charity, water and what it would do.

Speaker 3: 19:48

We combined our 100-hour weeks. I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but sometimes we count it and we're like well, I think we did 100 hours this week, but we loved it. It's a passion. You're birthing something Charity.

Speaker 3: 20:04

Water didn't exist in the world. Millions of donors had never given to clean drinking water. So you're also energized by the winds. You're energized by the water projects that are springing up all over the world, by the people that are getting clean water. You know I've been to 72 countries now. I've been to Africa more than 55 times now. I've been to Africa more than 55 times when I'm in a community that didn't have clean water. And then I go back six months later and I see the transformation. Yeah, that keeps you going. That provides a huge amount of energy. I mean, I've had these moments where, you know, last year we helped 2 million people get clean water. I've had moments where I've been in a village and said it would have been all worth it for these couple hundred people. You know all the work would have been worth it. And then you're like, well, it wasn't 200 people, it was actually 200, you know, 2 million people that got the benefit of that.

Speaker 2: 21:01

What was it like? So talk me through. You start Charity Water. Where was the first well? How did you choose where it was going to be? What is, and do you still do it that way? Do you build a well?

Speaker 3: 21:14

Are you still?

Speaker 2: 21:15

doing some of the like life straw type stuff.

Speaker 3: 21:18

Yeah, very, very different today than the other. The first day of Charity Water was a party in the nightclub and I was turning 31 years old and I threw myself a 31st birthday party. I got the club donated, I got open bar donated for one hour and I invited everybody I knew to come and they had to donate $20 to get in the door of the club. And at the end of the night we collected $15,000 in cash and we built our first well in Northern Uganda. And I actually did it with a guy named Bob Goff, who I'm sure some people know, who had an organization up there named Restore, and I'd met him and he said I know a well driller, I know a place where a refugee camp that really needs clean water, and I said, great, why $15,000? And we wound up drilling a couple of wells there and then sending out a photographer to photograph the wells and then sending the satellite images and the photographs of the wells and actually video of clean water flowing back to the 700 people who came to the party and we said you gave $20, 100% of your $20 wound up here and people's lives are transformed because you went to a club and gave $20.

Speaker 3: 22:28

Let's do that again, and that was day one of Charity Water, and we've tried to do a version of that formula inviting people to contribute to a solvable problem and then showing them stories of impact. We've tried to do that, you know, for 16 years now. Today, gosh, there's a programs team. There are, you know, almost 30 people who are water experts and hydrogeologists and auditors, and we fund 14 different technologies. So a well would be one of 14 different solutions, and the solutions now range from a $65 bio sand filter in Cambodia to a $1.8 million solar system connecting 19 villages in Rwanda, and then everything in between. So we're completely agnostic when it comes to the solution and we now have 14 different tools that we can use across 29 different countries.

Speaker 2: 23:27

How many people are on your team now?

Speaker 3: 23:29

We're about 110 in the States and then about 2000 locals working through the partners, so they're on our payroll but indirectly through about 50 local partner organizations. Really cool, how much do you understand all of the 14 different technologies that could be used? I mean pretty well now, just because I've been in the field so much. Travel and taking major donors and spending time with our partners has just been such a big part of my life over 16 years. So, yeah, I could probably geek out on. Maybe it might surprise people, were they your ideas. So yeah, I could probably geek out on. Maybe it might surprise people.

Speaker 2: 24:07

Were they your ideas.

Speaker 3: 24:10

No, no, no. I mean I just hired a bunch of water experts to you know, I hired an amazing leader who's been with me now for over 10 years, you know, who really built a world-class water programs department and then a world-class portfolio of 50 local partners now across 29 countries.

Speaker 2: 24:31

So maybe this comes into the partner thing, but one of the questions I wanted to ask. I remember back years ago, when I was in college, I went to India and we built a sustainable water irrigation system for being able to plant gardens at an orphanage, and one of the things we did not do well was ensure that they could keep up with it and that it would continue to be life-giving for them for five years a decade. So when it comes to any of these 14 different technologies, how do you make sure that, when this new thing is brought into a community, that the community knows how to take care of it, how to keep it sustainable for long periods of time? All of those things.

Speaker 3: 25:16

I'm glad you asked. That is a multi, multi-million dollar strategy and you know division now of Charity Water, which is really the ongoing maintenance and repairs of projects. I'm trying to think where to even start on this. Let's talk about a well. 25% of the wells in Africa are broken right now. The problem is nobody knows which 25%, because when a government or an NGO goes out and builds a well, at best they take a picture of the well, they train the local community and the ongoing maintenance of that project and then they send the donor a pretty picture for the refrigerator. Yeah, that works 75% of the time, 25% of the time, which is not. I mean, it's not terrible, right, he's not 10% of the time, right.

Speaker 3: 26:12

But what happens is sometimes a major repair is needed, or sometimes the head of the water committee dies, who is the woman, who is the treasurer, who is responsible for collecting money from every user of that well and putting that into a maintenance account, kind of saving for the future. In one village the village chief's son was about to die of malaria and the water committee took every single penny they had in the water fund and they paid to save the chief's son's life through treatment, and then the well broke paid to save the chief son's life through treatment, and then the well broke. So imagine every possible scenario throughout a fragile environment like rural Ethiopia or Malawi or Bangladesh, where things could go wrong. So what we've tried to do is develop technology to create smart wells. So, in the same way that, if you're familiar with Nest, you can monitor the temperature of a home from across an ocean and turn your heat up or turn your heat down, we are creating smart wells. So we now have 8,000 wells that are connected to the cloud, that self-report exactly how much water is flowing every single day and when a well breaks. We then have created almost like AppleCare for wells or Best Buy's Geek Squad, where mechanics go out, make service calls and then they're paid by the local committee. But if the committee didn't have money, like in the case of the malaria, we would backstop that just to make sure that the well is fixed and the clean water continues to flow. So we've invested over $11 million now of R&D. This was funded by Google and complete outside technology partners for this hardware and this is something we're really trying to scale. It's all open source as well. So the government of Ghana just ran a test using our technology on Ghanaian government wells and Charity. Water has never worked in Ghana, so we don't even have a footprint of funding or infrastructure there, and that's really exciting for us that this technology that we've developed over the last eight years could be useful for the whole sector.

Speaker 3: 28:24

A well is like a car You're going to need an oil change, your brake pads are going to wear at some point and you're going to need new tires. If you are counting the cost of that upcoming maintenance for your car, you're fine. And then maybe there's a catalytic converter. You have small maintenance things $50 oil change, no big deal and then you have big maintenance things. So a well is just like that. If you take care of a car my wife's grandparents drive a 1998 Lexus. I mean this car you could probably sell it for $75. It has 330,000 miles on this thing.

Speaker 2: 29:03

Wow, that's amazing.

Speaker 3: 29:04

It's 24 years old and I drove it the other day and it's still Now. Grandpa took care of the car. He talks to the car, he washes the car by hand. He took care of this asset for a quarter of a century and 330,000 miles later it's still benefiting these 80-year-old couple Amazing. Now there's also A well could be like maybe a Ford Mustang in Las Vegas over spring break, treated very differently and probably a very different life expectancy on it. So Charity Water is in the maintenance business now and we're investing millions and millions of dollars to make sure that the infrastructure we build continues to benefit people over time.

Speaker 2: 29:46

Infrastructure- we build continues to benefit people over time. Yeah, and how many people is it now that still are lacking access to clean water?

Speaker 3: 29:59

We've made progress. So when I started, it was a billion worldwide, or one in six. Population has grown and still we've taken the number down now to 770 million, so it's one in 10 people alive. Depending on how you look at that, you could say that's insane. Two Americas full of people right now are drinking disgusting water that could kill them and their children, and yet you know, elon is landing rockets in the middle of an ocean on moving platforms. Right, like you know, ai and machine learning has like come so far, but yet we can't get 700 million people clean water. But we've also made progress and I think what's really important for people to know now is 82% of the people on earth without water now live in rural communities. Most of the progress has been made in the densely populated urban and peri-urban environments, so this is now much more last mile stuff. It gets harder to get the 771 down to zero, but it's solvable. There's not a single person alive right now. We don't know how to help and that's why I'm 16 years into this. I'm still so energized because we can solve this problem in its totality.

Speaker 3: 31:11

My mom died of pancreatic cancer. The doctors had absolutely no idea what to do with stage four pancreatic cancer. They basically just said you're just going to die and we could do some chemo, but it's not going to work. There are so many diseases that are incurable or we're looking for that solution, maybe in a lab, maybe in a test tube, maybe it's 30 years from now.

Speaker 3: 31:34

Water is not like that. We have the solution. We have many solutions. We could help every single human being right now who's drinking dirty water. We could help them drink clean water. We don't have the money to do it. We haven't created the will, the global will to do it, but we know how to do it. So it's our job to get more people inspired and engaged in this issue, because when you do water, you're also impacting health. You're also impacting women and girls. In the 70 countries I've been to, I've never seen men get water. 100% of the time it's the women and the girls who are breaking their backs, wasting 40 billion hours just in Africa walking for water.

Speaker 3: 32:17

It impacts education. Half of the schools throughout the developing world don't have clean water for their students. I'm sure there's parents listening. Imagine sending your kid to a school with no water and no toilets. Imagine your teenage girl when she starts to menstruate, staying home five days every single month because she's not going to go to a school with no water and no toilets. And then she's now behind in her schoolwork and the social pressure says well, you probably shouldn't get educated anyway, you're a girl, just go walk for water or go collect firewood. Probably shouldn't get educated anyway, you're a girl, just go walk for water or go collect firewood. So you know water sits at the core of so many other systemic problems facing society and you know, in some ways it's like a seven in one issue. You know you tackle food security and gender equality and health and livelihoods and, uh, and education. You know, just by, just by providing the most basic things. So I'm I'm, as you can tell, I'm still excited about water 16 years later.

Speaker 2: 33:12

As you should be my. Both of my kids are from India and when we brought them home a couple of years ago, my son was two at the time, he was the youngest of the two. Uh, my son was two. My daughter was four and a half at the time we brought them home and he had Giardia from.

Speaker 3: 33:28

Yeah, who knows Waterborne disease Sure?

Speaker 2: 33:31

A waterborne disease. And you know, he's this little two year old who's already malnourished, already hasn't been held as much as he needed to be, if at all, and on top of this he has. He's fighting this in his stomach and you know, added to more now malnourishment for him.

Speaker 2: 33:49

And so thankfully, you know, here we're able to get him clean water, we're able to get him the medicine he needs. But it just shakes me at my core to think of how many kids don't have, don't have that and it's, as you're saying, because of water. So for this, for me, it's personally, cause I just remember that little, that little boy, our two-year-old son, who's so helpless in it.

Speaker 2: 34:13

But what can we do to help to actually see change happen in the world to see people, children, babies have clean water. How can we partner with you, how can my listeners partner with you to help that happen even more?

Speaker 3: 34:37

Yeah, this sounds surprising, but it only costs about $40 to help somebody get clean water. Amazing, and think of that as a 10-year solution for the life of the project, and some of these projects can last far longer. So you know, look, charity Water has a lot of ways that people can engage. It costs about $10,000 to help a whole community. So there's some people, some families. At the end of the year, you know they will write a check for an entire community to get clean water. We have kids out there selling lemonade and sending in $8.16, knowing that $8.16 will go directly to help people get clean water, and they helped almost a person.

Speaker 3: 35:22

We have this amazing community called the Spring that now spans. We have members in 149 countries and this is just like Netflix or Spotify for clean water People who show up every month and they give 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks a month, whatever they can afford, and instead of getting music or TV or movies, 100% of what they give goes and helps people get clean water. And we built a really cool system where you can track your impact over time. People can invite their friends and then track the impact of their friends or their network on the spring, and I was telling you before we started, that actually helped us triple the organization. So it wasn't the big million dollar donations that helped us make the greatest impact. It was a bunch of people showing up at 20, 30, 40 bucks a month, because a lot of people can do that. I mean, netflix has almost 200 million people paying every single month for movies and TV.

Speaker 3: 36:25

You'd think we should be able to get a million people excited about clean water, or 10 million people. You know, I'd argue there are 200 million people that could stand for, you know, their brothers and sisters around the world getting access to the most basic thing needed to live on this planet, to thrive, to be human, uh, as clean water. So, um, yeah, I think we, we, we can set up a just a link where people could go, if, if your community wanted to learn more, um, just charitywaterorg, and you could learn more about the different ways to get involved. And there's some videos uh, there's a video as well on that page, kind of, of the charity water story. I think it's gotten over a hundred million views now across platforms and, um, even if somebody has no money to give, you could share that, you could share the story with others.

Speaker 2: 37:12

Scott, I would love to ask if you could just help us understand a little bit more. I mean, you've said women are the ones having to walk. It can change their education when water is more accessible to them. But what have you actually seen that Charity Water has been able to do that you can share with our listeners to help them just visualize? This is the impact that clean water has on a person and a society.

Speaker 3: 37:39

Well, I'll tell you two stories. The first one buckle up because it's kind of shocking. I was in Ethiopia. This is a few years ago. Um, I've been there 31 times now. So this is a country where we've we've worked extensively and I was in a $5 a night hotel room and I came out and I was sitting in the cafe and the owner recognized me because charity water is a big footprint in the area and sits down and says you're the water guy. You know, I come from a rural village, you know hours from here.

Speaker 3: 38:10

But let me tell you a story. And he said well, growing up in my village there was a woman In fact all the women used to walk eight hours for water. Now, you know, eight hours sounds like a cliche, right? It just sounds like hyperbole. Until you actually walk eight hours with a woman and it's four hours out and four hours back, or really sometimes it's three hours out with the empty can and five hours back, because it's a lot slower hauling 40 pounds of water.

Speaker 3: 38:33

Yeah, so he said, you know, one day there was this woman in my village and you know she does her eight hour walk and before she gets home he said she slips and she falls and she spills her water and she breaks her clay pot into pieces. And he said she was in such despair that she hung herself from the nearby tree. She took the rope that she used to use to fasten the clay pot to her shoulders and she tied it around her neck. She climbed the tree and she jumped, he said. The village elders found her body swinging from a tree with the clay pot next to her, and I remember thinking at first that's not true either. People don't hang themselves from trees because they spill water. But that really gnawed at me and I went to actually live in that village for a week and meet her mother and meet her friends and her family and visit her burial site, to walk in her footsteps those eight hours to see the water that wasn't even clean. I mean, it came from a nasty source that you wouldn't let a dog drink from, let alone a human. And at the very end of that trip they took me to the tree and it was a very small tree and what I didn't know until I had gone all the way there to this village was that she was a 13-year-old girl.

Speaker 3: 39:54

I'd imagined a woman at the end of her life, tired of walking, and a very different suicide than a child suicide, than a teen suicide. And I remember being with her best friend and I said, well, why do you think she did it? You know, why not go back for more water? And her friend said shame, which was translated through Ethiopian to English. And she said, you know, she was such a responsible girl that she would have had such shame that she'd let her family down through her carelessness of slipping and falling, because not only was she coming home after eight hours empty-handed with no water, she'd also broken the clay pot which was a valuable asset to the family and that would have just been too much for her to bear to face them. So you know, look, I'm sure no one listening thinks 13-year-old girls should be swinging from trees because they spilled their water. That was eight hours away and dirty Cause. That just happens to be where they were born. You know, I didn't choose to be born in Philadelphia into a middle-class environment, any more than Letakiros chose to be born in Northern Ethiopia. So you know, I wish I could tell you that's an isolated, traumatic story, but I've, I've heard stories of children dragged off by crocodiles, getting water from rivers, women raped on the way to get water, women attacked by hyenas and lions, because in so many of these communities, you're sharing the same source with the wildlife and not like just the domestic wildlife, the wild wildlife. I'll end on a happier story.

Speaker 3: 41:33

There's a woman we helped early on named Helen Appio, in Northern Uganda, actually not far from where our first well was, and we visited the village a bunch of times and on one of the times we said Helen, you used to walk such a far distance. You know, you've got clean water. Now the well is right next to your house. You can take all the water you want. How's your life different? How has this really impacted you as a you know, 50-something-year-old woman? And she said well, that's easy, I am beautiful now.

Speaker 3: 42:05

And I remember our team was like yeah, of course you're beautiful, helen, like you're a beautiful Ugandan woman. She said no, you don't understand. She said I had a lot of kids and the water was far and I could only bring a limited quantity back for my family every day. And she said as a Ugandan woman, I always put my family first, excuse me. She said that's what we do. She said I always gave the water to them and it was for their school uniforms to be washed, and it was for the kids to drink and for gardening and keeping the house clean. She said I never use the water for myself. I always went last.

Speaker 3: 42:41

And she said now I can take all the water that I want. And she said I can wash my face, I can wash my body and I can wash my clothes. And she said now I'm beautiful, look at me. She said, look at me, I'm looking so smart, right, and you know, again, I mean this thing that most of us take for granted. Just think if you weren't clean, if you went through your life dirty, and you went through your life dirty so that other people in your family could be clean, and then one day you can be clean, you can have all the water you want for drinking. You don't have to make those trade-offs or sacrifices.

Speaker 2: 43:21

That's right. We are so blessed. Anyone who's able to listen to this podcast is blessed and blessed enough to be able to do something, whether it's giving and partnering with Charity Water or not doing something to just be aware of the people around us who are in need. And sometimes it's the people next door, but sometimes it's the people in Ethiopia or in Uganda or in India who need our help. So, scott, thank you. I am going to be promoting and supporting Charity Water and, of course, I'm going to be encouraging the listeners for us to band together and see how much of an impact we can make for clean water to happen all over the world and all of the. How many countries are you, are you in now?

Speaker 2: 44:05

29, 29, 29 countries, which is fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your mission and drive to to start this 16 years ago and your faithfulness of seeing it through so far.

Speaker 1: 44:41

Thanks for having me on and letting me share ready, but I hadn't listened to it in several months, uh, and I just completely forgot how inspiring the story is, uh, of Scott's and of charity water and some of the stories that he told um, and how we can forget that something so simple to us as water, clean water can be taken for granted, because there are millions of people still around the world who don't have access to clean drinking water, and that's the mission of charity water. If you'd like to learn more about charity water and how you can give, you can go to charitywaterorg, and if you can't give, the least that we can do is share the video, share the story, share this podcast, so that more people can be made aware of the issue that is clean drinking water around the world. Thanks for being a devoted listener of the podcast and especially episodes like this, where we can all learn how to make a difference in the world. And until next week, stay strong.