Drinking Water (31 page)

In 2004, Scott Harrison was one of the top event planners in New York City. He lived the high life, clubbing with the A-list crowd in Manhattan, drinking $350 bottles of vodka, dating a model, taking vacations all over the world. He had grown up in a religious family but he left for New York City and did everything his family had told him not to: “From eighteen to twenty-eight, I partied and did drugs.” He was successful by any measure, had a
remarkable talent for organization and for engaging with people, but he felt empty.

On a whim he still doesn’t completely understand, he walked away from it all and volunteered to work on the Mercy Ship
Anastasis
, heading to Liberia to provide badly needed medical services for free. He bluffed about his experience as a photojournalist to the organizers, reading the Nikon camera manual as the ship steamed east. Arriving in Liberia, he found a capital ravaged by war and literally hundreds of people with facial deformities waiting to be treated by doctors on the
Anastasis
. As Harrison recounted, “I fell in love with Liberia—a country with no public electricity, running water, or sewage. Spending time in a leper colony and many remote villages, I put a face to the world’s 1.2 billion living in poverty. Those living on less than $365 a year—money I used to blow on a bottle of Grey Goose vodka at a fancy club. Before tip.”

Harrison pauses in the story. He’s a powerful speaker and knows it. The slide show is slick. Naked words appear on the screen and fade out, a graphic photo taking its place. The audience is following his every word.

Everywhere Harrison traveled in Africa, unsafe water seemed to be at the root of so many of the hardships he saw. “I saw school after school with no clean water. There were no iPods. Just yellow jerry cans as their accessories.” Most communities don’t have enough money to boil water before drinking. Charcoal is too expensive. It’s illegal to cut down trees, and cow dung, the regular fuel source, doesn’t burn hot enough to boil for long enough. Instead, he saw people relying on crude filters, usually just pouring water though a dress or some other fabric. He shows slides of a small water hole, puddles in trampled mud beside cows and children. “This is a common sight at drinking holes. Kids and cows. The cows are bigger, so they go first.”

Returning to the States, Harrison was a changed man. He decided to get involved, raise money, and make a difference. The problem was that he didn’t think much of organized charity. He had been remarkably effective in getting people to go to club parties
and spend money there. Why not do the same raising money for clean water in developing countries? The key, he realized, was clever marketing. And he knew he could do that.

So he founded the group Charity: Water. To raise money, he started selling twenty-dollar bottles of water. All of the money raised went to water projects in Africa. “It was a context-shifting bottle of water. We put on a black label with facts of death and disease. Putting them in hotels was great. They already cost ten or eleven dollars, and business people could expense them to the room.” He got others excited and they started selling water bottles, too. Seven-year-old Max Schmidhauser sold seven thousand dollars’ worth. Steve Sabba, a small-time accountant in New York working in a cramped office, got in touch. “He said he could sell five thousand of water. We said, ‘OK, that’s a lot of water.’ He set up a credit card terminal in his office.” Sabba raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, got his first passport at fifty years old, and went to Liberia to see the wells he had funded

Using his A-list of contacts, Harrison raised fifteen thousand dollars at his thirty-first birthday party. With the money, he fixed three wells and built three more. He took photos and sent emails back to everyone who had contributed—“Some couldn’t even remember the party.” For the one-year anniversary of Charity: Water and his thirty-second birthday, he decided to invite people
not
to attend a party: “Instead, I gave up my birthday and asked people to give thirty-two dollars instead.” Ninety-two people joined him for their September birthdays, giving up their birthdays for gifts. He shows a montage on the screen of ninety-two faces, including a monkey. “I don’t know about that one,” he deadpans. He eventually raised a hundred fifty thousand dollars, enough for three hospitals and one school.

Harrison is now getting into it. Energetic, hands moving, eyes sparkling, he is fully engaged. You can see why he was so successful on the club scene. You’d love to party with this guy. His birthday giving concept is scalable. He wants to make it ten times bigger, so he created the website borninseptember.org. His goal was to raise $1.2 million. And that’s just the beginning. “So you open it up to
every month. You can give up your wedding, your anniversary. We already have a hundred fifty schools signed up. Micropayments can really scale, and not just in the U.S.” You can see his mind clicking. This is social entrepreneurship in real time.

Harrison went to the management of Saks Fifth Avenue and put his sales skills to the test. As he described, “So I went to them and said, ‘Hey, like we’re a year old and just got our 501(c)(3), and you should do this with us.’ And they got the message.” One expects that the discussions were a bit more involved, and Harrison can surely tell a good story. Saks became a strong supporter. The store sold Charity: Water bracelets and dedicated its Fifth Avenue windows for a week to displays of the jerry cans used to collect water. This directly followed their Giorgio Armani display. Quite a contrast. Saks’ efforts raised $540,000 in two months.

Using fashion photographers for publicity shots, Harrison re-created photos of gathering water in Africa, but now set in the Upper East Side. Kids dressed for the most expensive schools in the city were carrying forty-pound jerry cans on their backs. “It’s not OK for our kids to carry forty pounds of water on their backs to school, so why is it OK in Uganda when the kids don’t go to school?” A crew of forty-five filmed a public service announcement. Well-dressed people walk out of their luxury apartment buildings and line up to fill their jerry cans from a dirty pond in Central Park. The entire production was done on a shoestring budget of five thousand dollars, yet it managed to attract big-name talent such as actress Jennifer Connelly. Using Harrison’s club connections, the spot was aired for free on the hit show
American Idol
, and seen by twenty-five million people in an ad slot that normally cost one million dollars per minute.

Harrison lists example after example of creative, clever ways to raise money and spread the message. He wanted Charity: Water to be the first charity to use Twitter for fund-raising so he helped come up with the idea for the “Twestival.” Through tweeted micropayments, more than two hundred cities around the globe hosted events that more than ten thousand people attended, raising $250,000. The drilling of his first “tweet well” was posted online.

Actor Hugh Jackman tweeted, “I will donate 100K to one individual’s favorite nonprofit organization. Of course, you must convince me why by using 140 characters or less.” Harrison was in Uganda and immediately went to a local school for his tweet. He also urged Charity: Water’s more than 140,000 followers on Twitter to encourage Jackman to give them money. Choosing among thousands of suggestions, Jackman contributed fifty thousand dollars to the group and one other. Harrison says that Charity: Water received three hundred media mentions in its first three years with no marketing budget. In its first two and a half years, the group raised $9.5 million from more than forty thousand donors.

Charity: Water always works with local partners. The community is charged with looking after the well, while the organization contributes to a fund every month so there is money to pay for parts and repairs when the well breaks down. Responsibility stays local.

This is not just a story of clever marketing. Harrison is literally trying to reinvent how charities operate for his generation. From his perspective, it all starts with the brand: “Design is so important to me. Just because you’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean you have to have bad design.” Everything about Charity: Water has a clean, sharp look about it. It has a fashion sense, from the black labels on the bottled water to the organization’s website.
People
magazine had a feature on him in its article “Super Heroes,” and the teaser headline read, “Think all the Good Ones Are Taken? Meet Three Hot Humanitarians.”

But it goes beyond image: “Charities were so bad at proving what they did.” Harrison found that his friends wanted to donate but were cynical about their money going to administrative costs or corrupt locals. He decided to show that every penny went to help people: “Every project we funded had to have a GPS coordinate. We partnered with Google Earth so people can see exactly where their well is.” He posted videos of the wells actually being built. “Our plan is to go back in five years to audit every water point.” Donors can track their donations on another continent. Harrison is committed to full transparency in all aspects of operation. The group’s audit reports and tax forms for every year are easily downloadable from the website.

Harrison runs a lean operation and separately solicits donations to cover administrative costs and overhead—that way every dollar Charity: Water raises from the public goes directly to projects. Harrison understands that guilt doesn’t sell nearly as well as the satisfaction in making a difference to other people’s lives.

“I would have called myself a very noncreative person during the decade of nightlife. I mean, we just did the same thing over and over again, and it was banal and just boring. With water, I mean, oh, my gosh, I have twenty years of ideas. It’s such an exciting space. You can tell people stories. If your goal is trying to get people to understand what you’re seeing, I mean, I walk between two worlds. I’m in remote villages in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, and then I’m at fancy dinners hanging out with millionaires. And constantly going through my mind is, how do I get the millionaire to understand what the woman just said? I mean, how do I get him to understand about leeches in the water? That’s just so foreign.”

Surrounded by students after the talk, he is still brainstorming. One student talks about a creative engineer she knows. He picks up a plastic jerry jug and starts showing her how they need a new design so that straps can be put on to carry it more easily. “Maybe it can curve this way,” he wonders aloud.

Harrison is a visionary, but he’s realistic, as well. Working with local partners, Charity: Water claims to have provided clean water for two million people in its first five years of operation. But, Harrison readily acknowledges, the challenge of providing safe drinking water in much of the developing world remains a daunting challenge. “This only will have solved one-tenth of 1 percent of the problem.”

Despite the scale of the challenge, though, there is real progress on the ground. The UN currently estimates that most regions of the world will meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the population without safe drinking water by 2015. Increased adoption of POU strategies holds out great hope. And if anyone can make a difference in addressing this intractable problem, you get the feeling Scott Harrison will lead the way.

D
OES
D
OWSING
W
ORK
?

Where surface sources for water are not available, locating groundwater is as important for a wealthy vineyard in California’s Napa Valley as for a poor village in rural Botswana. Digging a well requires a serious commitment of time and labor, so you want to hit water the first time. Today, those seeking to dig a well can rely on sophisticated technologies ranging from low-frequency sensors and ground penetrating radar to geophysical tomographs. Prior to the advent of advanced geological sensing technologies, however, how did people know where to dig when water may (or may not) be ten feet or even lower beneath the ground?

One of the oldest techniques that persists through today is known as dowsing, divining, or water-witching. Depending on the technique, a dowser holds a forked stick (preferably willow or hazel, one fork in each hand), a pendulum, or L-and Y-shaped rods in front, parallel to the ground. He then walks around searching for the presence of water underneath him. When the stick dips sharply, the pendulum shifts position, or the rods cross one another, and the dowser knows he is over water.

Dowsing has also been used to search for mineral deposits at least since 16th century Germany and likely earlier. A founder of the American Society of Dowsing describes the technique as “the exercise of a human faculty, which allows one to obtain information in a manner beyond the scope and power of the standard human physical senses of sight, sound, touch, etc.”

Not surprisingly, skeptics have long challenged whether there are any modes of detection “beyond the scope and power of the standard human physical senses of sight, sound, touch, etc.” One could imagine, for example, that a dowser is unconsciously aware of subtle physical cues in the landscape suggesting groundwater. Another cause may be what psychologists call the “Ideomotor Effect,” unconscious motion that is consistent with the person’s expectations.

While many adherents swear to dowsing’s effectiveness, scientific studies have yet to confirm this. In a comprehensive and clever experiment in Germany, researchers buried a plastic pipe a foot and a half below the ground. With the flick of a switch they could turn on the flow of water through the pipe. Dowsers were shown the location of the pipes and asked to determine whether water was flowing. Thirty dowsers from Germany, Denmark, Austria and France volunteered to participate. For the first ten tests, they were told the water was flowing and asked to confirm this. The control was important because it provided a baseline and ensured there were no “anomalies” in the landscape that might disrupt the dowsers’ detection ability. All the dowsers agreed that water was, in fact, both present and flowing. This was followed by three days of tests when the water flow was turned on and off based on a random pattern. The dowsers’ predictions matched what would be expected by pure chance. Other studies have reached similar results.