Lani Fortier got things done. We’d met through mutual friends during my second Liberia tour. In addition to assisting doctors and working in the kitchen, Lani helped repair an orphanage just outside Monrovia and played for the Liberian women’s soccer team in her free time. We actually didn’t know each other that well until the day she stepped up to save my going-away bash.
On the day of the party, all of Monrovia suddenly went on lockdown when word got out that ousted Liberian warlord Charles Taylor was being flown to Monrovia’s airport to be arrested and charged with war crimes. UN and local officials feared his presence could reignite tension and cause riots, so no one was allowed on the streets after dark.
Lani first helped me work with the United Nations and the U.S. embassy to get special clearance for the party, and then coordinated the ship’s vehicles to move all one hundred guests in staggered time slots, with a security escort, safely to and from the hotel. I was impressed with Lani’s hustle, so I told her about my idea to take the mercy. exhibition to the biggest cities across Europe.
“What about coming to work with me when you finish your tour?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Why not. I mean, what could be more fun than running around Europe for a year?”
Lani grew up in New Hampshire, studied at the University of Connecticut, and had planned to attend medical school after graduation. But during her stint with Mercy Ships, she discovered that she enjoyed haggling with businessmen over the price of mud bricks and bunk beds as she worked to improve the orphanage. She felt drawn to humanitarian aid work, and her interest in practicing medicine soon faded.
By June 2006, I’d emailed Lani to tell her the big news. The European mercy. tour was off, but I was starting my own charity. And I really did need her help.
“Can you just come to New York instead? It’s the greatest city in the world. I promise it will be interesting.”
“Okay,” Lani said, thinking to herself, I’m twenty-four, I’ve been living on a ship in battle-scarred Liberia. I’ve got no set plans. How bad could New York be?
She gave away most of her clothes and belongings in Africa, packed a small suitcase, and by the end of July was working fifteen-hour days with me at Brantly’s place. At night, she crashed on a friend’s couch in a small West Village apartment, rent free. We had no cash, but plenty of energy and way too much confidence for two people with zero experience running a charity.
It felt like we were building a start-up. On a typical day, I’d say, “Lani, I need to go to Uganda and chase down some stories. Do you think you could loan us the money to buy a good camera?”
“Sure,” she’d say, handing me her credit card.
“Lani, I want to build a huge water exhibition across New York City. Ten parks in ten days. Who do you think I need to meet to get the permits?”
“I have no idea,” she’d respond while simultaneously dialing the Parks Department and the Chamber of Commerce. When she finally did find the one guy who granted permits for that kind of thing, I found out where he worked and cornered him in his office. When he wouldn’t give a firm yes on the spot, I sent him a stream of twenty follow-up emails and took him out to lunch until he finally gave in.
I was on a mission, with no bureaucracy or approval process to slow me down. And Lani indulged my audacity. Maybe she felt energized by it, or maybe she knew that if my heart was really set on something, it was just easier to get on board.
I liked Lani: she was irreverent and really didn’t care what people thought of her. That included me. She’d tag along to my meetings dressed in flip-flops and cargo pants, and call me “Harrison” in a flippant, irritated tone. She’d sit with me across from exhibition builders, bottled-water distributors, and potential sponsors, listening to me boast, “Yes, we’re doing a huge water exhibit in ten major parks across the city. We’re going to raise $100,000 in the next two months, and we’ll use all the money to build wells with the NGOs we’ve partnered with in Africa.” All the while, she’d quietly think to herself, Wow. This all sounds great, but none of that is happening yet!
Running to the next meeting, she’d berate me, “What are you talking about, Harrison? We’re gonna do what? You’re way overcommitting. You’ve gotta rein it in!”
But I think she knew that there was no reining it in.
In the beginning, we spent most of our money on photo/video gear and trips to Africa—and most of our time creating videos and writing stories. Conventional wisdom says that you don’t start a charity by prioritizing content, but I believed we needed compelling stories about real people who were drinking bad water. Without them, there would be nothing to talk about, nothing to inspire donors to care or give.
To find those stories, we needed to find the best local partners: experienced NGOs who could connect our fledgling nonprofit to the people we wanted to serve. I didn’t know how to pick them, so I emailed Trent Stamp, the president of Charity Navigator, one of the largest and most respected evaluators of nonprofits. Trent came to Brantly’s apartment to hear my pitch, and he helped us choose our first four partners: Healing Hands International in Ethiopia, Concern Worldwide in Uganda, Water for People in Malawi, and Living Water International in the Central African Republic, which partnered with a local group called Water for Good. They were some of the top-rated charitable organizations building clean-water projects in Africa.
In those early days, Lani and I would basically promise our partners: “We’re going to raise money for you. You don’t need to do anything. But we need to talk about your work and put your name on our brochures. Can we use your brand and your trademarks, please?” Getting permission required lots of phone calls and in-person meetings to show everyone we were really serious. I’m not sure that I would have let two young humanitarians with no experience put our name all over their fundraising materials, but in the end, nobody turned us down.
At the same time that I was promising our new partners money that we had yet to raise, I was also forming an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All summer, I’d been reading Nonprofit Kit for Dummies and asking to look at the bylaws of other organizations for ideas. Bylaws are an organization’s mission statement, its reason for existing in the world—and they eventually have to be approved by the IRS in order for the organization to become tax-exempt, which is how people get a tax break when they donate to you. I sweated over the wording of our bylaws, creating multiple drafts with Lani and a group of business leaders I knew from church who’d agreed to be my founding board members.
I decided to call the umbrella organization Charity Global Inc. We’d do business as charity: water first, and then expand to charity: education, charity: health, charity: shelter—moving from problem to problem until we saved the whole world. I wanted to be the Richard Branson of philanthropy. But in the back of my mind, I was terrified that our 501(c)(3) application wouldn’t be taken seriously.
On paper, I was a terrible bet. My story read like satire from The Onion: “Former nightclub promoter, thousands of dollars in debt, starts charity from friend’s cozy drug den.” If they really stopped to look, no one in their right mind at the IRS was ever going to give me charitable status. Our application needed to be absolutely perfect. So I hired expensive lawyers who’d taken hundreds of charities through the process. In the fall of 2006, they helped channel my grandiose ideas into an application that felt serious, thoughtful, and legitimate.
“Scott, just be prepared. This process could take up to two years before you get an answer from the IRS,” the lawyer said. Two years? Had I heard him right?
“And we’ll probably have to go through several rounds of clarifying questions,” he added. That was devastating news. It meant we wouldn’t be able to give donors any tax benefits until then. But what else could we do? We pressed on, hoping for a speedier review.
I went back to Africa in August—this time to Northern Uganda. My mission was to meet with local residents and NGOs and photograph the worst water I could find. By the end of my trip, I’d found it—along with a greater sense of urgency for our work.
On the morning of August 4, I jumped in the back of a blue Toyota Land Cruiser that smelled like dirt and sweat, where I was joined by two local aid workers. We raced through Uganda’s wild Northwest, followed closely by a military truck carrying heavily armed soldiers. Security measures were extremely tight because the notorious cannibal warlord Joseph Kony was still on the loose, and rebels from his Lord’s Resistance Army had recently been seen in the area.
After eight hours of driving, we finally reached Bobi, the largest internally displaced persons camp in Northern Uganda. Bobi was overflowing with orphans, widows, and broken families who’d fled their villages ten years earlier. They’d been running from Kony’s guerrillas, who had snatched scores of children from their homes and forced them to become killing machines. An astonishing 31,638 people were now registered at Bobi. Their one-room dirt-floor homes, just round mud-and-grass huts, were packed so tightly together in some places that there was barely room to walk between them. Cholera, measles, and diarrhea can spread quickly in conditions like these.
But despite all the suffering, overcrowding, and insufficient food, there was a spirit of family and community in the camp. Kids played games of tag and hide-and-seek, running in and out of huts with doors made from flattened tin cans of USAID vegetable oil. Women in faded dresses chatted like old friends as they sat in line for hours with their yellow Jerry Cans next to the only working hand-pumped well.
One well for 31,638 people.
According to UN standards, a single well should serve a maximum of 250 people, which means this camp should’ve had 125 wells.
“Where’s everyone else getting their water from?” I asked.
“This way,” a guide motioned. We walked through the camp, then down a hilly slope to a massive water hole surrounded by tall palm trees, where a group of women were collecting stagnant brown water. As we watched them dip their cans into the mud hole, I couldn’t help but think that when I flushed the toilet in Brantly’s apartment, I was draining half the amount of water that one woman here used to drink, wash, cook, and clean in a whole day. The people of Bobi desperately needed our help. We had to get them clean water now.
We weren’t even an official charity yet in the eyes of the U.S. government. I had no money and was practically homeless, living off the goodwill of friends. A rational person probably would have thought, I should focus on getting my own life in order first.
But none of that mattered to me. A day I spent worrying about myself was a day when more lives at Bobi would be lost. Their needs were more urgent than anything else I could think of.
Still, I was broke. So I did the only thing I knew I was really good at.
I threw a party.