Charity: water’s official launch took place in a nightclub, the day after my thirty-first birthday. I had no money or budget, but a good nightclub promoter knows how to work his birthday. It’s the one night when you can call in a ton of favors, and everybody comes out because they know you’re going to show them a good time. My friends didn’t know it yet, but by the end of the night, they’d learn about the global water crisis—and, I hoped, decide to become part of the solution.
A hot new dance club in the Meatpacking District, called Tenjune, gave us the venue for free. Inside, we lined the walls with huge photos of people drinking dirty water in Uganda. A liquor sponsor pitched in enough alcohol to run an open bar for the first hour—a great way to lure people in the door—and celebrities like Mark Ruffalo, Joaquin Phoenix, Lauren Bush, and Terry George (the director of Hotel Rwanda) turned up in support. On the night of the event, Lani worked the velvet rope.
“I hate this, Harrison,” she said, holding a guest list of RSVPs. “Do you know how hard it is to turn people away?”
“Yes!” I laughed. “I did it for ten years. That’s why you’re doing it!”
To enter, everyone had to drop a $20 donation into a Plexiglas cube at the door. Seven hundred people showed up. A few gave even more than $20—like Brantly’s weed dealer friend, who threw $500 in the box and said, “Hey bro. First donation I’ve ever made to a charity.”
The next day, we counted and re-counted the cash, and filled out forms to document the donations. We’d raised $15,000 in one night, all to give the people of Bobi clean water. It was amazing.
“Dude, we’re a real charity now!” Lani said. She was right; we were in business.
Being a real charity meant more meetings and even longer hours for both of us, because I was spinning a hundred ideas at a time on no sleep. We created a wonky little website, and began taking donations and selling CHARITY: WATER T-shirts and wristbands. I had this crazy idea to sell custom bottled water (the kind you’d normally buy for $1) for $20, and give all the proceeds to our new NGO partners to build wells. I thought the intentionally outrageous price point would generate awareness and show how far the gap between rich and poor really was.
Bottled water was normally marketed in cheery blues and aqua greens, so we worked with a printer to design all-black labels with white typeface. Our labels read: OVER 1 BILLION PEOPLE WALK AT LEAST 3 HOURS EACH DAY TO COLLECT WATER, and MORE THAN 4,500 CHILDREN DIED TODAY FROM UNSAFE WATER.
I pitched it like this: For $20, you’re getting a single 16.9 ounce bottle, but you’re providing the equivalent of more than fifty thousand bottles of water in developing nations, given that a well can pump one million liters a year and provide a community with clean, safe drinking water for more than fifteen years. The numbers sounded good, but what I didn’t know at the time was that nobody really knew how long wells lasted. Years later, I would be forced to reckon with that ugly truth.
Still, the $20 bottles (which we bought for 41 cents apiece) proved to be highly efficient fundraising—a forty-eightfold profit. Later, we started selling them in bulk ($480 for a case of twenty-four), and Lani or a volunteer would deliver water around town, collecting checks and swiping credit cards on our clunky black machines. We had so much water that we were stacking pallets of it up to the ceiling in Brantly’s spare bathroom, like a massive Jenga puzzle. One day, Brantly left some incense burning next to the tub and melted half a pallet.
The water was heavy and a pain to move around, but it looked cool, and everyone wanted it. During Fashion Week, we got the staff at Lotus to sell bottles and wear our T-shirts. Celebrities, socialites, and entrepreneurs let us place charity: water at their birthday parties, magazine launches, and posh event spaces—raising $660 here, $2,300 there. We even got the Soho House, the Mercer Hotel, and Claridge’s in London to place it in every room. Our name was getting out there. Lani and I had become a glorified bottled water sales team.
Two weeks after my birthday, we kicked off a ten-day, five-park outdoor exhibition in Union Square. Lou, a club friend who designed sets for music videos, helped us build an eye-catching display on the cheap: a series of tall black panels on wheels, which told the story of dirty water. We collected scummy green liquid from nearby ponds and rivers and poured it into giant Plexiglas aquariums embedded in the panels. We wanted to show people: Look at this disgusting water! If your tap were turned off today, this is what you’d have to drink!
Initially, I had a grand vision for the centerpiece of the exhibition, something that would wow people and draw them in. Lou and Lani listened patiently to my pitch.
“Okay, imagine a giant, gleaming clear cylinder towering over the humanity of New York City. People walking by the park will tilt their heads and say, ‘What on earth is that?’ and they’ll have to come see it. Then they’ll discover it’s filled with cold bottles of charity: water—and if they feed the tower a twenty-dollar bill, it drops a bottle in their hands!”
“Sounds great, Scott,” Lou said. “But that would cost over $100,000 to build.”
In the end, we settled for a piece of a salvaged tin duct as our tower. We then Velcro-taped hundreds of empty charity: water bottles side by side to hide the ugly metal cylinder, and surrounded that with a Plexiglas bucket, where we stored the actual water bottles that people could buy. The signs and handouts promised that 100 percent of every purchase would go toward building wells with our NGO partners in Uganda, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Central African Republic.
About a hundred family members, friends, and friends of friends came out to volunteer at the exhibit, to speak to New Yorkers and tourists about charity: water’s mission. On our first day in Union Square, more than fifteen hundred people showed up, and we sold $3,000 worth of water—enough to rehabilitate one well. On our second day, more than two thousand people came, and we sold another $5,600 of charity: water bottles—enough to hand-dig a new well.
Mom and Dad drove out to help that weekend. I was super busy and constantly moving, but seeing my mother in Union Square, with traffic fumes swirling around her, strangers and their offbeat scents passing by, and her being okay with it all—it was so gratifying. She was present and healthy in a way I’d never experienced.
By our third day, on Sunday afternoon, the forecast called for rain, which threatened to stain and warp the photo panels. I looked up from my phone and asked a young woman who’d been working with us all day to go buy tarps to protect them. She walked off and hurried back with exactly what was needed. We outlasted the rain, and by the end of the day, she was one of the last volunteers standing.
“Hey,” I said. “You’ve been here all day! What’s your name? How’d you hear about us?”
She was shy and cute, with big dark-brown eyes, and looked to be in her early twenties. She wore a ponytail and the CHARITY: WATER T-shirt we’d given out to all the volunteers.
“Viktoria,” she said. “My neighbor Lou told me what you were doing. I think it’s cool.”
“Well, thanks for getting those tarps so fast, and for being here all day. If you’re free, we’ll be back here in the morning!”
I was headed toward the truck to start packing up, but she stopped me.
“Look, I’m sure you probably have tons of people helping,” she said. “But I’m a graphic designer, if you ever need that kind of help. I can tell from the exhibit that you put a lot of thought into everything.”
“Yes!” I said. “You have no idea. We desperately need that kind of help. Can you come to our office next week when the show is finished?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught my mother, always the journalist, snapping a photo of us talking.
The following week, Viktoria Alexeeva showed up after work for an interview dressed in heels, her laptop under her arm.
“Oh,” she said, looking around at Brantly’s apartment in confusion. “Um…hi.”
I hadn’t told her that our “office” at 109 Spring Street was actually a bachelor pad with a sunken living room, a creepy wooden sauna, and a rotating cast of characters who looked like they’d stepped off the set of Trainspotting.
When she didn’t begin slowly backing out the door, I whipped open my laptop and showed her where it had all begun: the ship, screening day, Alfred’s tumor photos, Dr. Gary, Uganda, kids drinking from mud puddles. She was very quiet.
When I stopped talking, she wiped a tear from her eye and asked, “When do you want me to show up?”
“Could you come tomorrow after you finish work?” I said, adding, “I can’t pay you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Tomorrow is fine.”
Vik, as everyone called her, was twenty-three and a junior motion graphics artist at a small design agency. She worked on campaigns for big brands like American Express, Nike, and Honda. She didn’t know anything about dirty water. She’d never been to Africa, and she didn’t come from a family of do-gooders. Like many Americans, her interest in other countries was spurred by a work of fiction, a film. Earlier that year, she’d watched The Constant Gardener, a movie about activism and corporate corruption in Kenya, and it made her question whether her talents as an artist could do something more than craft ads for car companies.
Thankfully, we met just as charity: water was bursting into the spotlight. Our ten-day traveling water exhibition raised almost $20,000 in October. We split it four ways, sending it to our partner organizations and helping more than a thousand people get clean water for the first time. Pretty soon, journalists from USA Today, CBS News, and Page Six started calling to learn more about our work. We sold out of T-shirts and bracelets. And we started planning a gala because I’d heard that charities raise real money by doing pricey dinners in fancy venues, so I figured we should try our hand at one.
All of this meant that a million random things needed to be designed. Vik came by Brantly’s most evenings and weekends to create invitations, brochures, business cards, tax receipts, letterhead, and images for emails. I kept throwing projects at her, and she kept learning new skills to keep up. When I asked her to edit our videos, she taught herself Final Cut Pro and even got her boss’s blessing to cut charity: water videos after-hours in the editing suite at her office. When I asked her to add pages to the website, she figured out HTML and JavaScript and learned to code. She was always head down, working hard, ready for more.
After a while, I invited Vik to join me and Lani at church.
“Um, okay,” she said.
“Great! Let’s meet up for the 11 a.m. service,” I said. “We can come back to work at the office afterward.” She could have been an atheist for all I knew; it didn’t really occur to me to ask. Lani and I had a lot of fun going to church, so inviting Vik to join us was like asking her to go with us for a drink after work.
When I first came back to the States, I church-shopped for a while and found myself drawn to a place called Brooklyn Tabernacle. The rapturous, predominantly black and Latino gospel church met in a former movie theater and was famous for its Grammy-winning choir. On Sundays, there’d be at least eighty people onstage, singing with giant smiles on their faces. The sanctuary held 3,200 exuberant parishioners, and you had to get there thirty minutes early just to get a decent seat. Out in the congregation, the balcony would literally shake and rock from all the dancing. Lani and I were up there every week, clapping and singing next to little old ladies with their hands in the air, shouting, “Praise Jesus! Oh! Oh! Oh! He’s so good to me!”
Vik’s religious upbringing couldn’t have been more different from mine. Over a working dinner one night, she told us how she’d grown up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and had come to the States in 1992, when she was just nine years old. She was not a churchgoer. Her childhood encounters with the Russian Orthodox Church were dour and inconsequential. The priests chanted and swung heavy silver censers. The Brooklyn Tabernacle experience—the exuberant, gospel-singing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs, contagious kind of faith—was completely foreign to her. I remember, on that first outing, Vik shooting me a startled look when the grandmother next to her went down on blue-stockinged knees and began speaking in tongues.
Ha, I bet she’s loving this! I thought to myself. Who wouldn’t?
Back at the apartment-slash-office, the three of us would sit around the kitchen table late into the night, working nonstop. Vik would crack up when Lani yelled at me over stupid things—the way I banged on the computer keys or talked too loudly on the phone.
“Harrison, take it out on the fire escape, please,” she’d yell, sending me climbing out the window to finish my call. Around 8 p.m., I’d start cooking up a big pot of pasta and meat sauce, blasting lounge music from my iPod. My longtime buddy Matt Oliver, who’d attended that basement-video Christian school with me, would come over to hang out. He’d always bring over a few bottles of nice wine. We were working hundred-hour weeks, burning the midnight oil, and building the world’s greatest charity. There was no reason we couldn’t enjoy ourselves at the same time.
At the end of October, I left again for Africa, this time on a twelve-day trip to Ethiopia to scout potential well sites. I’d been told by our water partners that in this vast country of seventy-six million people, only 24 percent of the population had access to clean, safe drinking water.
It was daunting to think how much money it would really take to make a dent in a problem so big. Still, I wondered: What if Mercy Ships had been put off by the enormous need for medical care when it sent its first ship to Mexico? What if Dr. Gary had been overwhelmed by the thousands of patients waiting to be seen on his first screening day? Focus on the present, I thought. One well at a time.
During this trip, I photographed children digging in the sand, hoping to find precious water. I saw hunched women walk miles in the heat with jugs of dirty fluid tied to their backs. I toured a health clinic that served a population of 103,000, and learned that 50 percent of its patients were suffering from waterborne diseases. The statistics were real.
I also met a woman who, for as long as she could remember, had walked three hours a day to collect water contaminated with cow feces—that is, until our partners drilled a well that brought freshwater to the center of her town.
“Mai hiwet eyu”—Water is life—people would say over and over again in the villages. Water is life.
Returning home in November, I got news from our partners in Uganda that charity: water’s very first projects had been completed. The residents of the Bobi IDP camp had celebrated the construction of three new wells, and we’d also rehabilitated three older wells whose hand pumps had broken. It wasn’t the 125 wells that Bobi needed, but it was progress.
Now came the fun part. I sent an email to everyone who had attended my thirty-first birthday party, attaching photos and a link to a video of Bobi villagers drinking clean water. “Here are the six wells YOU built in Uganda! You personally helped thousands to get clean water!”
I’m sure some of my friends didn’t even remember attending the party. They’d come to a club, thrown twenty bucks in a box, and enjoyed a few drinks. But once they saw what their small donation had accomplished, the response was overwhelming.
“This is really awesome!”
“Wow, thanks so much for following up with me!”
“Do you have any more photos?”
“When’s the next fundraiser? Let’s do it again!”
We’d proved that giving could be fun. We’d gotten everyone excited about bringing clean water to people a world away. I wondered, What if it’s really this simple?