Hey, guys. It's Scott Harrison. I'm the founder and CEO of Charity Water. And I'm so excited to talk a little bit today about Charity Water and my story founding the organization. So, I took a pretty non-traditional path. And maybe, unlike many of you, I spent about a decade, from 18 to 28, just living selfishly. I was in the nightclub business here in New York city, and basically, got people drunk for a living for about ten years. And I had rejected a very conservative Christian faith growing up, had thrown away all my morals and just decided to live a debaucherous life. So thankfully, after ten years of that, at 28 years old, I began to rediscover faith. I decided, what would the opposite of my life look like? What would it look like to care about others? What would it look like to serve others? And I made a radical change. I sold all my possessions in New York. I gave up my apartment and moved to Liberia. I joined a humanitarian mission as a volunteer. And I spent the better part of two years with these incredible doctors who were offering medical services for free. Now, I was observing surgeries. I'd signed up as a volunteer photo journalist. So, I was taking pictures and writing stories about the the amazing work they were doing. And I was sharing it with the ten years, all the people that I had met in ten years of night life, and realized that there was a real power in story telling. There was a real power in these images to move people towards empathy and compassion. Probably the most important thing that I learned in those two years working with the doctors was that the lack of access to clean water. The water, the dirty water, people were drinking in Liberia, in the rural areas, was the source of so much of this disease. So, when I came back to New York City, I was 30. I decided, maybe this was the question behind the question. Maybe the root of so much of so much sickness, so much of the world's disease was, actually, just the fact that people didn't have clean water to drink. At that time, there were 1.1 billion people on earth that had no clean water. There were over 2 billion people without a toilet. So, as I was thinking of problems to solve, this seemed like a pretty big one. And none of my friends knew there was a water crisis. To them, the water crisis was the bottles of Pellegrino in our clubs cost 10 bucks. Water was everywhere here in America. And no one I knew had ever, ever had to drink dirty water in their entire life. So when I founded Charity Water, I actually, a lot of people don't know this, but I started the organization and just called it imply Charity. My vision was not foremost to tackle the water crisis, but really to try and inspire people to give. To get them interested in living more generous, compassionate lives. I had missed out, during my selfish decade, serving only myself, and I wanted others to have an opportunity to serve the poor. So, I really wanted to reinvent charity. As I was talking to my friends, I realized that many of them weren't giving because they didn't trust charities. And I thought, maybe we could design a new way, a new kind of organization that would deal with some of these problems. And the biggest problem I heard was just, I don't know where my money goes. When I give to a charity, I don't know where it goes. I don't know how much of it actually reaches the people on the ground. I don't feel connected to my impact. So really, the vision was to reinvent charity. The mission was to help bring clean drinking water to everybody on earth. And with a billion customers, it was a lot of work to be done. So, kind of put them together, charity, water, and the organization started just over eight years ago. We just celebrated our eighth anniversary. So people ask sometimes, why water,and what about that colon? Were you gonna do charity education or charity malaria, or charity shelter, or charity HIV-AIDS? That actually was part of the initial vision. We thought if we're reinventing charity, maybe we can take this community and tackle all of these different issues. We have decided to stay with water over the last eight years and continue focusing on water. Because the more we learn about water, the more we realize it touches almost all these other things that we want to do. For example, about half of the world's schools don't have clean water or toilet. So, rather than launching charity education, rather than building new schools, we said, why don't we bring Charity Water? Why don't we bring the thing we're good at? Bring our community, and build water projects at schools, and build toilets at schools. One of the main reasons that girls drop out of school is because they have to go fetch water every single day. Or they're too sick from diarrhea, from bilharzia, from some of these terrible diseases. Water obviously touches health. So, instead of building new health clinics, we saw statics that up to 80% of disease in the world is water and sanitation related. The lack of access to clean water kills more people every single year than all of the violence in the world, including wars. It is a deadly, deadly killer. So instead of starting charity health, we would continue to bring clean water to health clinics. And we would make people healthy by giving them access to clean water. So, the focus has been really important, going deeper with water, where solution agnostics. We now fund wells and rain water harvesting systems and biosin filters. And pond sand filters, and UV carbon, whatever the appropriate technology is to deliver clean and safe drinking water to the community in need. And we care a lot about sustainability, and are about to launch 4000 sensors, remote sensors, that we're able to put in these wells all around the world. So that we know not only that water continues to flow and serve these communities, but how much water is actually flowing. How much water people are taking, and how that's impacting the community? I think what I'm most excited about in the social impact space, is just the amount of energy, of enthusiasm, of velocity of young people, of old people getting involved, saying, I don't wanna go work on Wall Street anymore. This isn't about buying houses and cars. I wanna use my gifts. I wanna use my skills to serve others. The world is a pretty tough place. I just welcomed my first child into the world about three weeks ago, and it's not lost to my wife and I that our son, Jackson, was born into a world where he will never have to go hungry. He will never have to drink dirty water. A couple months ago, I was in the Sahara Desert of Niger. And I'm with community in 110 degree heat. Communities where women are telling us they had ten children, and they lost eight of them. Eight of their kids died just because of where they were born. They were born in harsh conditions. They were born in communities where there was no water, where the water was actually filthy, and it killed them. So I'm so excited that people are flooding the space, are so interested in starting their own organizations, in joining organizations like ours. We recently posted a job here at Charity Water for a receptionist, and we got over 500 applications. Over 500 people wanted to answer the phones here. Now, I don't think that was true 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. I guess my parting words would be, gosh, it sounds so cheesy, but follow the thing that you are really passionate about. For me, it was reinventing charity in water. For my friends, sometimes its HIV AIDS. Others it's education. Others it's cataract surgery, making sure people can see. But go deep. Spend time learning about the issue. Get as many people excited about it as possible. Learn how to tell stories. Learn how to tell stories visually. Learn how to take good photos or surround yourself with great photographers. Learn how to make great videos. Learn how to speak the language of today. To get people excited about your cause, excited about your mission, and excited about how can you change the world.
