If you’re reading this, you probably know about my fundraising campaign for charity: water. It’s a campaign I started as a way of saying thank you for the wonderful support I’ve received from so many people during my first year in business.
It’s About More than Water
“Water is an astonishingly complex and subtle force in an economy. It is the single constraint on the expansion of every city, and bankers and corporate executives have cited it as the only natural limit to economic growth.”
- – Margaret Catley-Carlson, Vice-Chair, World Economic Forum
When I started doing research about charity: water and the larger subject of providing clean water to areas of the world where it isn’t currently available, I began to understand that this issue is about a lot more than water. It’s also about equality, education, and economic opportunity.
Clean water saves lives, and that’s the most pressing issue. According to charity: water’s website, three children die every minute of water-borne illness. It’s a heartbreaking statistic.
But what surprised me even more was how the lack of clean water affects even healthy families and communities, creating conditions that make it difficult for these families and communities to rise above their economic situation. According to charity: water, “Half of the world’s schools don’t have access to clean water. As a result, kids in developing countries collectively miss millions of school days each year to stay home sick with waterborne illnesses or to spend their mornings walking far for water. Lack of clean water and latrines in the developing world affects girls especially — and many in the developing world drop out when they hit puberty.”
Lack of clean water affects girls more than boys because it’s the girls who often have the burden of walking to faraway wells and other sources to get water and bring it home. It’s a chore, according to a video on Water.org, that can take several hours a day, which limits their opportunity to do work that could financially benefit them and their families.
Water changes that. It creates opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist, says Matt Damon, who helped found Water.org.
In an article published in Wired Magazine in June 2011, Damon talks about a 14-year-old girl he met in Africa. Because a well had been drilled close to the girl’s home, making her walk to get clean water much shorter, she could now think in terms of schooling and improving her life.
“Now she can hope to be a nurse and contribute to the economic engine of Zambia,” Damon says. “Of all the different things that keep people in this kind of death spiral of extreme poverty, water just seemed so huge… And it doesn’t have to be.”
Here’s the really good news: the solution is cheap, at least by Western standards. Programs like those run by charity: water and Water.org don’t require a lot of money to be successful, but they deliver a lot in return. According to charity: water, “every dollar invested in improved water access and sanitation yields an average of $12 in economic returns.”
If that appeals to you, here’s how you can make a small investment pay off in a big way. By contributing to the campaign I’ve started to raise $5,000 for charity: water, you can help deliver $60,000 in real economic value, to say nothing of lives saved.
And because I’m doubling your donation through a Bullet Marketing match, your contribution goes even further. A $100 donation creates $2,400 in value. As any economist will tell you, that’s a tremendous investment. If you’d like to join this cause, visit my campaign page.
John, I’ve always loved what you do in Marketing. Thanks for bringing us into what you’re doing outside of Marketing.
Thank you, Karin. Doing pro bono work — working with and supporting charities — that’s important to me. I’ve worked with a number of great organizations and met a lot of wonderful people over the past few years, and I’m so inspired by people who dedicate their lives to helping others. That’s something I aspire to, in my limited way.