Darren [00:00:01]:

Hi and welcome back to another episode of one of one. I’m your host, Darren Gold, CEO of the Trium Group. My guest today is Scott Harrison, founder and CEO of water. Scott’s life is a case study in transformation. Raised in a deeply religious household, he left home at 18 to spend a decade as a successful high end nightclub promoter in Manhattan, only to wake up one day and realize his life was empty. That reckoning launched him on a journey of service that would take him from the excesses of Manhattan nightlife, to spending two years in the poorest country in the world, and eventually to founding water. Scott not only set out to solve one of the largest global health problems, the lack of clean drinking water, but to reimagine the model of philanthropy itself. In our conversation, we talk about the moment that sparked his transformation. His bold vision for providing clean drinking water to everyone on the planet by the end of his life, and his extraordinary ability to sustain energy and conviction over two decades living a life of service to those of greatest need. This episode left me deeply inspired and grateful. I trust it will do the same for you. Please enjoy this wonderful conversation with Scott Harrison. 

 

Hey, Scott, it’s really great to see you. We spoke last week and I’ve been really excited about this conversation we’re about to have. Thanks so much for being on the show. 

 

Scott Harrison [00:01:27]:

Of course. I am too. This is gonna be fun.

 

Darren [00:01:28]:

Yeah, yeah. There’s so many places to begin because you have such an interesting story and I thought we’d start there, which is your story, which you’ve shared with me, but I’d love for others to hear. And so if you could take us back to your life journey and the moment of inspiration that led to this extraordinary organization that you found at water, I’d love to start there.

 

Scott Harrison [00:01:54]:

Sure. Well, I guess if you go back at the beginning, there was a tragedy that happened when I was four in my family where my mother, on New Year’s Day 1980, passed out unconscious on her bedroom floor. And this led to hospital visits, blood tests, and then the discovery of a carbon monoxide leak in the basement of our house, the new house we had just moved into. And I was born in Philadelphia. My dad was kind of a middle class business guy working at a electrical engineering company. And we had just moved to South Jersey to get a little closer to his job. He wanted to reduce his commute and have a big family. And we bought an energy efficient house at the end of a cul-de-sac. And it’s great to have an energy efficient house unless you have a carbon monoxide leak inside the energy efficient house in winter. So mom was kind of the canary in the coal mine. He discovered the leak, ripped out the heater. We had some strange health symptoms leading up to it, but dad and I both bounced back and she just never did. So she became an invalid for the rest of my life. In that she was severely immunocompromised and her immune system just shut down. Kind of never turned back on. So she would be connected to oxygen, she would wear masks. In fact, she wore a mask for the next 40 some years of her life. I never really saw her face again after that. She would live in containment rooms in this house and then in the next, covered in aluminum foil. Darren tile scrubbed down 20 times with baking soda. So just a really kind of sterile, pure environment. Because anything chemical would set her off. Massive rashes, migraines, hypertension. So she would live a life that was really isolated. And as a kid I would take care of her, I would do the cooking, I would bring up her meals to these rooms and would kind of hang out with my dad and that was our job. So I was raised in a very conservative Christian house, kind of non denominational. They would bounce around to different, try a Baptist church or Presbyterian church or Methodist church. And I wanted to be a doctor. Growing up I believed that I would go to Johns Hopkins and I would find the cure for my mother and many of these other immunocompromised people that, that were in a community that kind of formed. So that was, that was kind of chapter one of my life. And then at 18 years old, instead of applying for medical school, I announced to my parents that instead I’m going to move to New York City and I’m going to become a nightclub promoter. Probably about the opposite of what they had hoped or expected. And you know, I think I’ve got.

 

Darren [00:04:49]:

I’ve got to pause you there.

 

Scott Harrison [00:04:50]:

Yeah, sure.

 

Darren [00:04:51]:

First of all, I do think at some point I want to return to that four year old boy and just understand how that shaped you and how you’ve dealt with the trauma of that, if that’s okay.

 

Scott Harrison [00:05:04]:

Yeah, sure.

 

Darren [00:05:05]:

But this decision at 18 to flip the switch from I’m going to medical school to nightclub promoter, like what happened?

 

Scott Harrison [00:05:12]:

Yeah, well, it started kind of. I joined a band. So the band, the rock band led me to New York City and then we immediately broke up because we all hated each other and you know, half the band was doing drugs and I learned anyway rock band, classic dude, you know, long. And I, my hair was down to my shoulders at the time. Like, terrible idea. I played a keyboard, you know, like a keytar. Okay. So, you know, I learned that the people who were booking the bands were actually the ones making real money. The people who were running the clubs who were promoting these nightclubs at the time. So the minute the band broke up, I announced that I was going to jump to the other side of the business and be the guy who filled the club and took the money home. And, you know, in some ways, this was just a cliche act of rebellion. You know, it was the prodigal son story, right? I was raised. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, I didn’t cuss. I couldn’t sleep around, you know, kind of purity culture. And one day and just said, I want to do all of those things. I mean, I want to sleep with beautiful models and I want to smoke and I want to drink and I want to try drugs, and I want to fly around the world to Fashion Week, and I’d like to have a, you know, a fast car and a Rolex and, you know, all of these things that I wasn’t allowed to have or even to want. So that started this journey for me in New York City, climbing up the ladder of nightlife from the very bottom. And I got pretty good at it. And to get good at it, you need to fill nightclubs full of beautiful, famous, wealthy people. And if you can put the right mix together, you can charge $1,000 for a bottle of champagne that cost you 40, and you can charge $25 for a cocktail that costs 25 cents. And over the next 10 years, to the chagrin of my parents, I picked up all of the vices that I had announced I would and worked at 40 different clubs in Manhattan, getting pretty close to the top of the food chain, where we were entertaining the celebrities and the Goldman bankers and the CEOs and the rock stars who would be out on the town.

 

Darren [00:07:33]:

What was it about you, Scott, that made you so good at what you do? Because I’m guessing that some of those traits are gonna reappear as we keep going on in this conversation.

 

Scott Harrison [00:07:44]:

I think I was just a good promoter. I was an enthusiast. I would get people excited about whatever we were doing, and I always tried to bring some creativity to the clubs. We would theme parties. I remember I would throw pool parties inside nightclubs, and I would hire people to sit on lifeguard stands in the middle of the dance floor and get a bunch of beach balls. And you know, tried to make it fun and tried to stand out a little bit from all the other clubs that, that you could go to on any given night and say, no, you need to be at ours. You know, this is the, this is the place to be. You need to get past this velvet rope. And in a way, you know, the story. I was a storyteller really for 10 years, but the story I was telling was a pretty meaningless one. I mean, I was saying that if you got past our velvet rope, you spent $10,000 on booze and you sat with the pretty people, then your life had profound meaning. You know, you would walk away from that club saying, I’ve done something special. And in fact, you know, you typically walked home wasted at 3 in the morning, you know, and it ruined, ruined your next morning. So that took 10 years to kind of run through that whole process. And I had a powerful moment when I was 28 years old. So a decade into this, I was in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in South America, and I was on a New Year’s Eve vacation. And we would always get the heck out of New York City because that’s when the tourists came to the clubs and nobody wanted to be in Manhattan for New Year’s Eve. So we would rent some compound where we’d rented a place in Uruguay and fly down there. And sometimes somebody had a private jet that we could all jump on. And I just remember it was the most beautiful setting, Darren, you know, this gorgeous compound, you know, near the beach. The compound came with a boat, you know, a yacht attached to it. And I just remember we were destroying the serenity with blasting house music and doing ecstasy and, you know, like I’d wake up in the, nine o’ clock in the morning and the compound was full of people dancing, getting thrown in the pool, just kind of off their minds. And I remember it just felt so unhealthy. And it’s almost like, you know, the game of musical chairs where every time previously the music had stopped, I had a chair to sit down in. And, you know, this moment, a decade into this selfish, sycophantic, hedonistic lifestyle, you know, the music stopped and I’m like, there’s no chair and I should really take stock of what’s next. And I hadn’t been involved in any religious practices for 10 years. So I’d really walked away from the faith of my childhood, the morality of my childhood. And that started a rediscovery moment of, you know, do I believe that there’s a God? Do I believe that we’re supposed to live for others and not ourselves. My gosh, how far I’ve slipped into depravity, you know, when it came to the virtue that my parents tried to instill in me as a, as a kid. And I just knew something needed to radically change. And I came back to New York City, you know, with that disruption. And it took about another six months where I just made a huge change. And I said, I’m going to sell everything I own. I’m going to start life over again at 28 years old. And I want to live in the poorest country in the world for one year and see if I can be of service, do I have anything to offer people in need. And you know, growing up in the church, there was this kind of money practice of tithing where you’d give 10% of your money to church and the poor. And this was kind of a tithe of time, you know, could I give one year of the ten that I’d wasted? And it turned out to be really difficult to volunteer for a humanitarian organization if you’re a nightclub promoter. So I got denied by the first 10 groups that I applied to. And I remember World Vision and the Salvation Army and the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders all turned me down. Doctors Without Borders is looking for doctors, it turns out, not club promoters. But this one organization finally did allow me to join their mission, provided I pay them $500 a month for the pleasure of volunteering. And I was going to be joining them on a mission to Liberia, West Africa, which was a country I’d never even heard of, but at that time, ironically, actually was the poorest country in the world. A 14 year civil war led by a brutal warlord, Charles Taylor, had just ended. There was economic data for the first time. And it came on kind of at the bottom of the charts of the world. A country with no electricity, no running water, no sewage system, no mail system, and one doctor for every 50,000 people living in the country. And this medical mission, actually a group of doctors operating on a 500 foot hospital ship, a converted ocean liner turned into a state of the art hospital, said that if I paid him 500 bucks a month, I could join the mission as a photojournalist and take pictures and write stories and help communicate or promote their work where they could raise awareness and raise money. And, you know, everything changed the day I walked up the gangway of that hospital ship and surrendered my passport. I vowed to never smoke again, to never touch drugs again, to never, you know, look at a pornographic image again, to never gamble again. I wanted to kind of have this. This clean break from my old life and start a new chapter. And there was something really symbolic about, you know, a gangway of a ship kind of being pulled up and then sailing away to a new continent, Africa, and a new life. And that kind of started act three.

 

Darren [00:13:38]:

That’s incredible. It’s an incredible story. And you’re an incredible storyteller already. That’s. That’s clear because you described yourself as something so. So Act 3 begins. And what was the year like? And what did it lead to for you?

 

Scott Harrison [00:13:55]:

I mean, I’d never experienced anything like a post war African nation. And it was just. There was no paradigm, you know, I mean, to go from spring champagne from the DJ booth, you know, as Jay Z was at table and a bunch of models are at table two and, you know, Jim Carrey’s at table three in a club. To a country, you know, that has just been decimated by war was in some ways really thrilling, if I’m honest. It was. It was. It was exciting. There were 14,000 United nations peacekeepers. There were choppers, there was barbed wire, there were tanks. You know, this was an important moment in the rebuilding of a country. Elections were held for the first time in a decade and a half. And I had this powerful moment, Darren, where my third day in Africa, my third day on this mission, it’s what we called the patient screening. So a small advance team had posted flyers throughout the country saying, a ship is coming, doctors are coming. If you have a facial tumor, if you have a cleft lip or a cleft palate, or if you’re blind with cataracts, or if you’ve been burned by rebel soldiers during the war, war turn up on this day, and our doctors will screen you, will triage you. And I learned that the government had given us the soccer stadium in the center of Monrovia to do this screening. And I knew that we had 1500 available surgery slots to fill. And I’ll never forget waking up that third day putting on hospital scrubs. It was 5, 5:30 in the morning. I grabbed my two Nikon D1X cameras, you know, new memory cards, full batteries, and I jump in this convoy of Land Rovers that are heading towards the stadium. And as we approach the stadium in those early morning dawn hours, there are 5,000 people that are waiting for us in the parking lot. And I remember getting on top of the Land Rover and taking a picture of the 5,000 people and just weeping. I mean, it hit Me, this need is so much greater, then we’re going to be able to meet and we’re going to send 3,000 plus sick people home without the chance to see a doctor. I later learned that many of these people had walked for more than a month, some of them walking from neighboring countries because the word had spread to Cote d’, Ivoire, to Sierra Leone, to Guinea, that there were doctors coming to Liberia that might be able to help them or their children. And we didn’t have enough doctors. And then the chief medical officer was a remarkable guy named Dr. Gary Parker, who became a mentor very early on of mine and sort of, I guess, the guide in my new life. And he told me that day, he said, you gotta focus on the hope. You gotta focus on the 1500 people who we are going to be able to help. And like me, he’d actually signed up for even a shorter tour of duty. He’d signed up for three months, had left his plastic surgery practice in California. You know, heard there was a ship where he, as a surgeon could. Could volunteer for a few months. And when I started my tour of duty, he had been on the ship 21 years. So he fell so in love with this work and service that he never went back to his plastic surgery practice.

 

Darren [00:17:17]:

Yeah.

 

Scott Harrison [00:17:18]:

And had spent two decades on the ship. So I wanted to know everything I could about him and what, what a prolonged life of service could look like and what it would feel like.

 

Darren [00:17:28]:

I know there’s so much more to come in this story, but there are people in my life that have, I think, considered or might be considering, and maybe perhaps people listening to this conversation, this kind of moment in time where they reassess their life and they devote the remaining part of their life to giving and philanthropy and doing real good in the world. Maybe it’s time to ask this question or maybe we come back to it, but is there anything that you would want to say to them, to those people that are like, in that moment of thinking about this, that, you know, you got some incredible mentorship and advice from somebody, what would you say to somebody in that situation?

 

Scott Harrison [00:18:10]:

Yeah, well, I’m always careful to give advice. You know, I think I can speak from personal experience. You know, I’m coming up on. I actually just hit 20 years now of service in Act 3, so still a little under Gary, where he was when I met him. But, you know, I think for 10 years, Darren, I had chased the idea of more of consumption. You know, the car would make me happy, the famous girlfriend would make me happy. The, the watch would make me happy. The place that I went on vacation would make me happy. And what I learned was somebody always had more and it was never enough. You would reach that moment and it just wouldn’t feel like it was supposed to because it was all about me. It was about what I would get and how I would feel collecting these markers of success. And I think what I found, you know, almost immediately was that there was this freedom in service when the focus and the attention and the energy was placed on helping others thrive, helping others get out of, you know, helping to end needless suffering and using your time and your resources to that end. You know, it’s like a weight had been lifted. And in a way, there’s still never enough. Yeah. Somebody sent me this picture from a New York deli, one of those boards where you kind of can change the letters every day or so. The quote was from like an ancient rabbinic text. Do not be afraid of work that has no end. Don’t be afraid of endless work. And in some ways the work of service is the same way. There’s no finish line. You know, you don’t say, oh, I’ve ended all the suffering in my local community, I’ve ended all the suffering in the global community. There’s really no drop the mic moment. But it’s such a different way to live a life. It’s such a different intention. And you look back and you say, oh, wow, actually I have helped a bunch of people rather than just accumulated a bunch of stuff.

 

Darren [00:20:28]:

Yeah, yeah. So this time in Liberia begins this new life for you of helping walk us through that time and what it led to.

 

Scott Harrison [00:20:39]:

Yeah, I mean, it was just, it was really before and after, you know, and in some ways, as extreme as my transformation had been, this was what we were delivering to the patients. So a child would walk up on the ship with a six pound fleshy tumor that had grown over many years, almost suffocating them to death, growing unchecked. And we would remove the tumor, giving this child their face and their life back. We would bring on a 30 year old woman who had been blind for 10 years as cataracts had taken over her eyes, you know, exposure to the equatorial sun, no UV protection, and had actually never seen her daughter. And in a 20 minute surgery, you know, where I’m standing there in scrubs, clicking away with a camera, you know, a doctor removes the cataract and sticks in a new lens. And then the next day the bandages are removed and she can see for the first time in a decade, and she can see her child. I mean, the moments of just of euphoria, really, that I was able to witness thanks to the intervention of these doctors who could have been in the Maldives, Darren. You know, they. They had money, you know, they could go anywhere they want for vacation, and instead they came to the poorest country in the world in the heat to operate for free.

 

Darren [00:22:04]:

I can’t help but, but see the connection here. If you don’t mind me probing gently here. I’m imagining this boy that wanted so badly to help his mother, probably couldn’t. And now you’re thrust into this environment where you’re seeing people in need get the help they want. Is that a fair connection to draw for you?

 

Scott Harrison [00:22:30]:

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to be a doctor, and then I wound up on a ship full of doctors.

 

Darren [00:22:33]:

Yeah, isn’t that crazy?

 

Scott Harrison [00:22:34]:

Documenting the work of these doctors, transforming people’s life. And then I think there’s even an interesting turn. So when the year ends, and this was kind of cool, Darren, because I had gone to Liberia with a big email list that I had amassed over 10 years in 40 clubs. And back then, email open rates were like 100%. You know, you would send an email and people would get it and they would open it. So I started blasting my club list, these photos and videos of surgeries, you know, before and afters. And, you know, of course there was some unsubscribes at first. People are like, man, I didn’t ask for the cleft lip party, right? I wanted to go to the Prada party downtown in soho. So, you know, there were a couple people that said, take me off this list. But what I learned is the list actually began to grow as these stories of transformation touched. People working at Chanel or at Goldman Sachs, people going out to clubs every night. And people began to send money to mercy ships and sponsor surgeries. People began to volunteer on the ship because of the awareness. So I think it was really cool that the thing that I had learned was almost instantly useful, the promoting. I just started promoting something completely different. You know, the idea that by serving, by giving, you could create a life of meaning and you could transform the lives of other people in such tangible, measurable ways. So that felt pretty good. Sitting on this ship in this tiny little cabin and taking the pictures that I had just shot in the operating theater that day in an eight and a half hour surgery and writing a story of what I saw and then sending it out to 15,000 people and getting that feedback in real time as people were just so moved by the work of these doctors.

 

Darren [00:24:35]:

Scott, does it ever make you think like, those 10 years were not wasted? I mean, obviously they were not wasted. And almost like in this, maybe this gets a little too spiritual, but, like this divine sense of we’re placed into these roles, and while they may not make sense in the moment, they’re. They’re. You know, you were there for almost a reason. Like, that’s. That’s what’s showing up for me as you tell that story.

 

Scott Harrison [00:24:58]:

Yeah, and there’s. There’s another fun turn in a minute. But the. The year ended, and I finished the year. I went back to Liberia for a second tour of duty for another year. And that is when I came across the water issue. And that second year, I remember I bought a motorcycle for like 500 bucks, like a used motorcycle. I wanted to get a little more freedom, get off the ship, get out of the capital city and into the rural areas. And as I would go into the rural areas, I saw the water that people were drinking, and it was disgusting. It was toxic, it was dirty. It was diseased and poisoned. It came from open swamps, from open rivers. It was filled with algae, it was filled with bugs. It was fecally contaminated, often as it was shared with animals. And I remember taking these pictures to Dr. Gary in his office and saying, you know, Dr. Gary, no wonder everybody’s sick. Like, dude, no wonder there’s 5,000 sick people waiting for us in the parking lot outside of a soccer stadium. You should see what people are drinking. And I learned really two simple things. Half the country was drinking dirty water, and half the disease in the country could be tracked back to that dirty water. And a lack of sanitation and hygiene, water related. And, you know, I was very fortunate. At the end of my second tour, Dr. Gary kind of simply said, why don’t you go work on this? Like, you want to be a doctor, you know, you want to continue on in healthcare, why don’t you just go bring everybody in the world clean water? You’d be the greatest doctor in the history of the world if you got people the most basic need for health. And at the time, Darren, 1 billion people on the planet 20 years ago were drinking dirty water on a 6 billion world population. So 1 in 6 people alive were drinking dirty water every day. And Gary’s like, yeah, why don’t you go solve it? So I came back to New York City at 30 years old. I was completely broke because nightclub promoters are not great at saving Money, we’re very good at spending it. And, you know, I was volunteering for two years and actually paying to do it. But my. My old club partner, business partner, took me in, and he let me live in the closet floor of his loft in soho rent free. He’s like, if you want to live in my walk in closet, it, I won’t charge you rent. So here I am, back off of two years in the ship, and I have my issue. My mission would be to bring a billion people in the world clean water. And I just started in his living room, and I think I had the advantage for maybe some of the entrepreneurs listening. This is a similar experience. I had the advantage of just not knowing any better and nothing about inside institutional philanthropy. You know, I had no trappings of the sector or how things were done. I remember buying one of those dummy books, like, you know, how to start a nonprofit for dummies, and you need a board, and you call the 501C3, and you’re gonna need to have board meetings and, you know, file with the IRS and all this stuff. So I had to learn all of that. But the advantage was I was talking to potential donors who were my age and who went out to clubs or worked at Sephora or MTV VH1, or they worked at, you know, Chase Bank. And I realized so many people didn’t trust charities. There was a cynicism, there was a skepticism when it came to giving your money away to charities. People thought that they were giving into a black hole. And, you know, I quickly found that the data backed this up. 42% of Americans who were polled by USA Today at the time just said they distrusted charities. And Another poll found 70% of Americans believed charities wasted their donations, at least in some part. And, you know, I thought, well, you know, if I’m going to try to solve a problem as big as, you know, getting a billion people water, we’re going to need to do things differently here, and we’re going to try to start a different charity that would speak to the cynic and the skeptic. Maybe there’s a way to reinvent or reimagine the entire space. So I had a couple ideas. The first was, well, what if I could design a business model where we promised that 100% of every donation we would ever take in would go directly to help people get water? And I actually wound up opening two separate bank accounts, one for overhead, where I would somehow convince people, you know, business leaders, I guess, or foundations or entrepreneurs to pay those unsexy office costs, the staff salaries, you know, the flights to Africa to develop these programs, so that in the other bank account, 100% of the public’s money would not be stepped on. And whether somebody gave a dollar or eventually a million dollars, they would know that everybody, all of it went directly to help people get water. So that was kind of the first big idea and it turned out to be unique. Other charities just weren’t operating like that. And then the second kind of follow on idea from that was, well, hey, if we’re not stepping on public donations, can’t we build technology that would track them down to the last mile, down to the village in Malawi or India or Cambodia or Bangladesh, where we could track a $6.15 donation that came from a lemonade stand and say, here’s where it went. And at the time, Google Earth had just been created, I met the founder of Google Earth and I said, here’s what I want to do. I want to build the most transparent charity in the history of the world. And he said, well, you’ll be able to put the photo and GPS data of every one of your water projects on Google Earth. And I remember going to Best Buy and buying a bunch of those yellow Garmin handheld GPS devices and saying, all right, we’re never going to build a water project unless we prove it. And we send the photos and the GPS coordinates and the satellite images back to our donors. So that just became the foundation, this transparency where 100% of the money goes and then this idea of proof where people could see exactly where their money’s going to. You know, later Google Maps came and we moved our projects from Google Earth to Google Maps, where they are today. And then maybe the third belief was to construct water projects in a culturally appropriate and sustainable way. They would have to be led by the locals in each of these countries of need. You know, no guy like me from New York should try to pretend to be a hydrogeologist and drill any wells. You know, we could build a movement, we could get people to care about an issue. We would raise money to directly help people, but we’d create thousands of local jobs, you know, Ethiopians constructing the project, leading their communities and countries forward. So if we were successful, we wouldn’t even get the credit. It would be led by these amazing local water technicians and hydrogeologists in each of these countries. So I hinted at this earlier, but I, I put the three things together and the best idea I had for day one of water was actually to throw a party in a nightclub and it was my 31st birthday. It was Fashion Week in New York. I got a club donated that nobody’d ever been to yet. Cause it was opening a week later. And I got Open Bar donated. And I emailed everybody I knew, and I said, I’m turning 31. I’m launching this thing called Charity Water. And to come to my birthday party, you have to bring $20 as a donation. And I put this big plexi box out at the door. And at the end of the night, there was $15,000 in that box. About 700 people had come through. And we took 100% of that money, and we took it to northern Uganda and we built our very first well. And then we took pictures and shot video, and we sent the proof back to the 700 people a month later. And we said, you came to a party, you gave $20, and here’s exactly where it went. And here are the people you helped. Let’s do more. And that was really the birth of the organization. And that was 186,000 water projects ago from that first one.

 

Darren [00:33:37]:

It’s an incredible story. I’ve got a number of things that I want to probe on with.

 

Scott Harrison [00:33:42]:

I will just tell you one anecdote from that night. I remember there was a wad of $400 that had been tossed in the box, and it came from a drug dealer, a guy I knew who used to sell weed. And he comes up to me at night and he says, this is the first charitable gift I have ever made in my human life. But I feel like I think I know where it’s going to go. I know you. And so I dropped the money in the box. And not that this would be water’s future donor audience, weed dealers, but it felt like such a proof of the concept that nobody was more cynical. Nobody was less likely to give away money than Lou. And Lou said, ah, what the heck, I’ll throw some money in to help people get water.

 

Darren [00:34:29]:

So you not only declared, I’m going to provide clean drinking water to a billion people, therefore eradicating the problem globally. I mean, that’s an extraordinary vision and commitment and declaration. But you also take on the very paradigm of philanthropy and reimagine it in the way you set up this 100% model and transparency and even employing local people. So I want to maybe on that second part of reimagining philanthropy, go there first, and then we’ll get into cherry water and what you’ve accomplished over the last two decades. I’m curious. Distrust in philanthropy has that shifted at all? And I’m also curious about your model. Has it, has it gotten some traction or are you still unique in this regard?

 

Scott Harrison [00:35:14]:

I think trust in philanthropy has gotten a little better. I think a lot of charities, especially ones that have been started over the last 20 years, have realized that transparency wins and that if you can tell donors what you did with their money, you have a better shot at getting them to continue to give rather than just continuing to mail them and asking them for money. So I think there’s been some improvements for sure in the sector. You know, there are others that have adopted our model. I will say I’m very hesitant to encourage others to do that because it’s unbelievably difficult. You know, if you really think about it, I could have $100 million in the water bank account, and if I don’t have money for payroll, we’re effectively insolvent. So for 19 years now, 19 plus years, we’ve had to be build these two things in perfect balance, and it’s extraordinarily difficult. Now. That’s allowed millions of donors globally to give in the purest way. So it’s an unbelievable donor experience. And we have NOW found about 140 CEOs, entrepreneurs and families who have come along. The staff and the operations and the overhead side, that’s a giving program that we call the well. And that needs to grow in proportion as we scale the donations for water. So it’s a challenge. It’s kind of always the existential challenge. It’s our challenge that we took on. But when people ask me for advice on the business model, I say, you could have, you should have overhead. In fact, some charities have too low overhead and their programs are crap because they’re not paying for the talent that they actually need to execute high quality programs, you know, whatever the mission is. So I’m not encouraging minuscule overheads. I think I’m just encouraging transparency. I believe donors are open to myriad value propositions if they trust. If I told your listeners that the biggest need at water was an Epson copy machine that cost 650 bucks because our broke and somehow that was gonna fulfill a business mission, people would be delighted to help buy a copy machine to move the mission forward and meet that need. It’s just the not knowing that I think has plagued the sector. The not knowing and then the not trusting or sometimes even finding out, hey, the money didn’t go where they said it was. It was going to go in the first place. That’s what I’M preaching is trust. Build relationship of trust and transparency and try to build, you know, a proof loop where people can see and that’s good for them, too. You know, Simon Sinek has been a well member on the overhead side for many years and a friend. And I remember he said to me once, like, we need to get people addicted to giving, right? The more you give, the more you give. So it’s almost like this muscle. So if we can give people a great experience, they give. They see where their money went. They keep giving, not just to us, but even to other organizations. They experience that joy in generosity rather than getting burned, throwing up their hands and saying, that’s why I don’t give money to charity. And then, you know, almost depriving themself of the joy of using their resources to improve the lives of others.

 

Darren [00:38:35]:

Yeah, let’s go to the billion people. I’m really curious what you.

 

Scott Harrison [00:38:40]:

Well, we’re at 703 million now, so, you know, on an 8 billion world population. So we’ve made a lot of progress as a sector. Water has directly helped a little over 20 million people in about 186,000 communities across 29 countries. So we’ve worked all over Africa and India and Southeast Asia, a little bit in Central and South America. But the movement of clean water, I think we’ve certainly contributed to some awareness as well, and we’ve made progress. And I think sometimes it might feel like we’re shoveling coal in the steam engine that’s just on the road to nowhere. And that’s not true. To go from 1 in 6 people alive without clean water to 1 in 10, 1 in 11 people alive. We are making progress. And what’s great about water, just talking about the issue for a second, it’s challenging because none of our donors or potential donors have ever experienced the problem. I’m gonna bet that none of your listeners have ever had to drink dirty, diseased water in their life. Now, maybe there’s a couple people who did emigrate from these countries and had that experience, but, you know, 99.9% of the people we talk to have never experienced that. If you were interviewing somebody working on Cancer Research, 100% of your listeners have been impacted by cancer. Right. Either ourselves or someone in our family or a loved one or a friend or a co worker. Right. 100% of us have an awareness and a human experience where cancer has been a part of our lives. So it’s much easier to raise money for pancreatic cancer research than for dirty water. For 703 million people living over there. And that’s why the storytelling and the proof, I think, has been so critical to building this movement. When you double click on the issue for a second, it makes almost more sense than anything else you could spend your money on. Because if you think about it, water impacts health, so you’re basically getting health for free. It impacts education as half of the schools throughout the developing world don’t have clean water to offer their students. They don’t have toilets. So when you bring water to schools, girls go back to school and get educated. Grades go up as the kids aren’t sick. It impacts women and girls. You know, today, women and girls will spend over 200 million hours walking for dirty water. Wow. That’s just in Africa. This is the continent of Africa. So you’re giving time back, and that time turns into productive work and entrepreneurship. And women, you know, with seven hours back in their day, seven days a week, start small businesses. They start baking things. They set up shops at the local market, and they use that money for education and to prove their homes. You know, there’s a climate piece to water. It makes communities more resilient to floods and drought. So, you know, water’s like this great core thing that transforms so many aspects of human life, but yet we’ve never experienced the problem.

 

Darren [00:41:48]:

Yeah, yeah. There’s something you showed me that was really powerful. The women carrying, I think it’s like 40 pounds of water up to seven or eight hours a day. And just the, you know, not being able to have experienced that system of transport for a basic good that we take for granted. So there is something about both storytelling and, like, pictures bringing to life photos, bringing to life this in a way. And I know that you’ve done an extraordinary job of bringing to life an issue that is hard to imagine, including some really creative things you’ve done with brands. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of what you did as I found it fascinating?

 

Scott Harrison [00:42:32]:

Well, one of the fun things we did that actually helped raise over $100 million was asking people to donate their birthdays and water. Kind of started on my 31st birthday in a nightclub and a year later said, well, I did that. I don’t want to go back to the club party fundraiser idea, but I’m turning 32. I don’t need anything for my birthday. I don’t need a belt or a gift card or a wallet. I certainly don’t need a birthday party. What if I asked for my age in dollars from everybody I knew? I said, you know, pretty much everyone I know can donate $32, knowing that 100% of it would go to help people get water. So I kind of launched this online email campaign and I emailed everybody I knew, and I wound up raising $59,000. And then I asked other people to donate their birthdays. And 6 year olds would ask for $6 and 89 year olds would ask for $89. And this movement of birthdays began to grow. And this was before GoFundMe, before Facebook causes. You know, we kind of built one of the first peer to peer fundraising systems in the world. And we built a closed system where we could track those birthday donations down to the exact village where the people were helped through those birthdays. So that was just one of the things that really helped us raise a lot of awareness. A lot of leaders in Silicon Valley, you know, Jack Dorsey did three birthdays, Daniel Ek from Spotify, Angela Ahrens from Apple, like, it just, it was a great kind of way to get both kids, people on pensions, and then, you know, people running companies who could just ask for their age in dollars and involve everyone in a beautiful story. We have worked with brands. You know, one of the challenges with our 100% model is we kind of. We never had a marketing budget. You know, we always seemed to raise enough money to pay for our team members, but we would have to create creative brand partnerships and rely on the mouthpiece of others to get the word out. So, you know, partnered with Google and with Amazon and, you know, early on with Twitter and, you know, always looking for creative ways to get the word out. I’m actually headed in a couple days to speak in Minneapolis to 10,000 stylists. Aveda has been one of our partners. And these stylists all around the world for one month will talk about water, they’ll talk about charity water, and they’ve got a captive audience. You’re coming in to get your hair done. So turning people into ambassadors like that, and then helping to turn that awareness into money that we can directly use to change people’s lives. We’ve done limited edition suitcases with away, we’ve done charity water toothbrushes. So we’re always kind of looking for the creative angle of does anybody listening? In AI, we think there’s a real opportunity with the water that’s used in data centers. As we continue to scale computing power. This is a finite resource and it’s not shared by 10% of the world. So how could we create a story that people are also getting water as water’s being used for computing power and the blossoming of AI. So we’re always looking for ways to do that. Look, we’ve raised a little bit over a billion dollars thanks to the generosity of really millions of people around the world who have said, I can reject the apathy that would be so easy to succumb to with a paralyzing global issue that doesn’t affect me. And, yeah, I’m gonna help people get water. In some ways, Darren, like, it’s the most inarguable common good. Maybe one of the few things that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. If you’re of a Jewish faith or a Christian faith or a Mormon faith, if you’re an atheist, if you’re an agnostic, like, everybody can kind of put differences aside and say, people need water. You know, I’m just gonna do something that is a universal, inarguable common good. So we’ve really been able to build a pretty big and wide tent of consensus by just focusing on that issue time and time again and actually trying to bring people together who might fight to the death on political or social issues, but can agree on that thing.

 

Darren [00:47:03]:

Yeah. So you’ve had this, I would say, enormous dent and impact. And I’m also imagining these. The kind of ripple effects that you’ve had on other organizations and consciousness around this issue in general, you’ve contributed to in a pretty meaningful way. So I’m curious, like, where do you, Scott, sit today? It sounds like you’re approaching 50. Is that.

 

Scott Harrison [00:47:26]:

Yeah, I’m 50 in a couple of weeks.

 

Darren [00:47:27]:

Okay. Yeah.

 

Scott Harrison [00:47:28]:

You know, look, I think it’s unfinished business. And, you know, should I continue to be blessed with health, you know, I’d like to continue to contribute. It is a solvable problem down to the last person. My mom eventually died of pancreatic cancer, and it was four months from diagnosis to death. The doctors had absolutely no idea how to help her. There was no procedure. There was no the chemo. Nothing worked. And there are so many problems that we don’t know how to solve. You know, ALS, Parkinson’s. We don’t have cures. You know, even after spending tens of billions of dollars. And maybe there’s a cure out there, but we actually have the cure for water. You know, we can take 703 million people today drinking dirty water down to zero. There’s not a single person alive on planet Earth where we’re scratching our head saying, we just can’t get them water. Like, they’re too far right. So that’s that’s really exciting when you know that you are working on a problem that can be solved in totality. And it just needs resources, you know, to put it in a big number. It’s about $55 billion to get 700 million people water. There’s $250 billion right now sitting in United States donor advised funds, parked philanthropic capital in DAFs. Right. 1/5 of that gets everybody water. So I think, you know, I would hope that we’re in the top of the second inning, you know, if it’s a baseball game of impact and we just need to be better storytellers, we need to keep showing up, we need to keep inviting people to join us, to join us in this solvable problem that transforms human life so immeasurably for the better. And, you know, hopefully this is a fraction, you know, 20 million people is a fraction of the impact that we’ll make five years from now or ten years from now. You, if we stay the course, you know, the. Maybe the long obedience in the same direction. So trying to conserve energy and make sure I’m a good husband and a good father. I’ve got a fourth kid on the way, which was a surprise for us and our family. And, you know, that’s trying to manage that tension of being out there on the road, asking people to give and also being home and, you know, leading my family and contributing at home.

 

Darren [00:49:50]:

Yeah. How are you managing that tension?

 

Scott Harrison [00:49:52]:

Well, it’s hard.

 

Darren [00:49:53]:

It’s hard.

 

Scott Harrison [00:49:55]:

It was great during COVID I went from 80 flights a year to zero. Although I think my wife would probably prefer 30.

 

Darren [00:50:02]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Scott Harrison [00:50:03]:

So it’s, it’s. It’s a challenge. You know, there. There’s a very famous organization, you know, one of the kind of household names that has a story most people don’t know about the founder. Many, many years ago. And, you know, the founder helped millions of kids around the. The world out of extreme poverty. And his daughter actually took her own life, and she wrote a suicide note to the effect of, dad, you were there for millions of other kids, but you were never there for me. And I remember reading that biography 20 years ago and just saying, I’ll never make that decision. So it’s certainly a tension to manage as my kids get older, I can take them. I just took my oldest two to Madagascar in South Africa last month. They’ve been to Uganda, walking for water, seeing wells being drilled, meeting our local partners. So I think that’s one of the, maybe the few perks of being a social entrepreneur. Is you can pull your kids out of school and say, we’re going to go have an experience together that hopefully connects them with their hearts to the mission and to service.

 

Darren [00:51:10]:

You said something about energy I just wanted to ask you about because 20 years is a long time to have. And what I experience when I hear your story and in this conversation right now is an extraordinary amount of energy that has been directed at this really, really important problem. How do you sustain it and what is it like for you?

 

Scott Harrison [00:51:32]:

I think there’s just such a deep level of conviction. I’ve been to Africa 55 times. I’ve had these moments, Darren, where, you know, we’ll help 2 million people in a year get water. And I’m standing in one community in Ethiopia saying it would have all been worth it for, for this community, you know, for this woman who has been breaking her back her entire life. And she was living on top of the resource that could have saved the lives of her children that she lost to diarrhea, to dysentery, and she didn’t have $10,000. She was a subsistence farmer. And, you know, I convinced somebody to buy a less expensive watch or, you know, I was at a restaurant the other day and a guy sitting next to me said, hey, you know, I did a well for you. I heard you speak once and I canceled a vacation. I was going on a vacation and I thought 10 grand on a vacation or 10,000 to give a couple hundred people water. And I said, I made that decision, so keep going. So I think there’s enough, you know, there’s enough of these little affirmations and, you know, and made a difference in the life of that giver, you know, who experienced the joy and he got to see it. So he knew exactly where his well was and that that proof loop, you know, was finished. You know, I think it’s just a deep level of conviction. People should have water. We built an organization that now has 20 years of experience. A world class organization that knows how to do it effectively and efficiently. I just need to get more people involved and try to move latent money, latent philanthropy on the sidelines and say, let us put it to work. Let us partner here.

 

Darren [00:53:11]:

Yeah, I can see, for those of you listening, I can see it in your eyes and it’s obvious how much and how deep you care. And I know this question’s occurring to me, so I’m just going to ask it as I think once you shared with me, you know, you’re dissatisfied, right? As much progress as you’ve made. There’s still so many people, and the solution is so clear. Despite being as challenging as it obviously is, I just wonder how much you’ve allowed yourself to acknowledge yourself for.

 

Scott Harrison [00:53:45]:

Yeah, I’m not very good at that. It’s very hard to celebrate the wins when the problem is so big and there are so many reasons, resources out there. So it’s really, you know, if I’m honest, it’s more, what are we doing wrong? Like, how are we not? What is the key? Like, how have we not unlocked, you know, that next level? How have we, you know, what are the keys to generosity? The key? What are the unlocks? So it’s more of kind of the quest. The best probably moments I’ve had, you know, is trying to put 20 million people into stadiums, you know, so I’ll be at Madison Square Garden with my wife, and, you know, we’re at a concert and it’s about 19,000 people, you know, for a sellout crowd. And, you know, I’ll say, wow, you know, we’ve done this over a thousand times and now we’re filling up a stadium every three and a half days, you know, of run rate. So that’s kind of cool, you know, to kind of look around and feel 20,000 people and know that, you know, Monday through Thursday, if we keep it up, you know, the donor community is going to throw another 20,000 people from dirty water to clean water. So that’s kind of a. It’s. It’s a measurable KPI. I’d like to add a zero to that.

 

Darren [00:55:04]:

Yeah, yeah, I get it. Well, I could see, you know, that even as I ask that question, your discomfort with it. And if I could be bold enough to offer you something, it would be that place to both the paradox of being highly dissatisfied and being extraordinarily proud of what you’ve accomplished. That would be my wish for you, if I could be so bold to offer it.

 

Scott Harrison [00:55:32]:

Well, thank you, Darren. That’s what you do for a living. So I will accept that you are the expert.

 

Darren [00:55:38]:

This has been an extraordinary conversation. I mean, and we’ve covered an incredible amount of ground. Anything that we haven’t covered that you’d want to make sure you offer or something that we have that you want to make a finer point on?

 

Scott Harrison [00:55:54]:

Yeah, I think just encouraging people to find those things that they can give their time and their money to. And I feel like so many people, they wait too long and they miss out of living vicariously through their money at work, you know, through charities, locally and globally, you know, they kind of, a lot of people, they just kind of let it sit there and, you know, I’ll get around to it and how it feels so hard to how am I going to know or pick or track it? And, you know, I think I would just encourage people to step out and start just engaging more. You know, there’s just. There’s so much wealth on the sidelines. People are busy, there is a sense of a lack of trust. But there are so many pressing needs meeting humanity right now, and we need them, you know, we need that. That money and that time and that mentorship to flow more freely.

 

Darren [00:56:56]:

That’s wonderful.

 

Scott Harrison [00:56:56]:

Not to use a water analogy on that was unintentional.

 

Darren [00:57:01]:

And you’ve made it very easy for people to do that. And I would really encourage anyone listening that has been inspired by this conversation to go to your website. You’ve done a wonderful job of that transparency and you’ve made it as easy as possible for people to do that. I love the well idea for those that have the means to contribute to the other side of your incredible philanthropy that powers everything that you’re doing. And you have an extraordinary list of people that have done that. And so for those of you that are in a position where that’s possible, I highly, highly encourage. You’re a gift to this planet, Scott. And I, for one, just want to really thank you for a life of devotion. I want to thank you for sharing your story so freely and beautifully. And I know I will be a part of your ongoing efforts, and I hope that more and more people continue to do so. And I want to thank you for being with me today.

 

Scott Harrison [00:58:04]:

Thanks, Darren. It was great spending time with you.

 

Darren [00:58:13]:

Scott’s story is a profound reminder of what becomes possible when we reimagine the purpose of our lives. It’s an extraordinary lesson in the power of conviction, the courage to reimagine and reinvent existing paradigms, and the persistence to work on the most pressing and challenging global problems of our time. It’s also an invitation to each of us to find our own unique way to be in service to those in need. I look forward to being with you on the next episode of One of One. Until then, I hope you live and lead with courage, wisdom, and above all, with love.