37
Just Keep Going
I came back from Rachel’s trip with a deep sense of hope, something I’d lost while dealing with the lawsuit. It was time to put every ounce of my energy into making charity: water stronger. It was time to grow up.
Amazingly, around the same period, charity: water got game-changing news. We’d won a $5 million Google Impact Award, a one-time grant for nonprofits that seek to tackle big global problems. I couldn’t believe it. Five million dollars. A new executive hire, a woman named Yukari Matsuzawa, who came over from Twitter, had helped us apply for the award. In our application, we’d talked about the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on water solutions around the world and how 40 percent of those solutions were broken at any given time. If that didn’t qualify as a “big global problem,” what did?
We’d assumed that there had to be technologies out there—sensors of some kind—that could be adapted to our needs and used to monitor the flow rates of wells and other water projects. Now Google had basically wired $5 million into our account and said, “Go figure it out.” It was a huge vote of confidence. We immediately found a guy named Robert Lee to manage the project and locate those sensors. Now I needed to hire someone really smart to oversee the overall sustainability initiative and upgrade our Water Programs department.
At the time, charity: water had eight talented twentysomethings in Water Programs. They managed all our grants, audited our partners, and oversaw the accounting—but none of them had ever lived in the countries they were managing. Nor were they fluent in the languages of our recipient countries, which posed a challenge when invoices came in written in French (which is widely spoken in Africa) or Amharic (Ethiopia).
Before I left for Rachel’s trip, I’d hired an executive search firm to help us find a leader for Water Programs. It was no small role. We needed someone with years of international NGO expertise—in other words, a bureaucrat, but without all the baggage. Over the years, I’d met people at large nonprofits who were cynical about their work. They complained about restrictive government contracts, which dictated with whom, when, where, and how they spent money. They’d lost their edge, and they sounded miserable.
In the past, I’d mistakenly filled executive-level roles with people like this. They had impressive résumés, having worked for top global NGOs, but then they’d expect to clock out at 5 p.m. every day. I’d also tried the opposite approach, hiring execs from top American for-profit firms. At first, they seemed happy enough to take the pay cut and work for an energetic start-up. But then they’d balk at flying coach, or not want to travel at all.
That wasn’t going to work at charity: water. We needed people who understood that we did things differently here. People who’d work hard because they shared our vision. And as Lauren Miller, now an executive, put it, they’d need “humble confidence.”
We needed to find more people like Michael Gumbley, whom we hired in September 2012 to lead Financial Compliance and Program Finance under Michael Letta. Gumbley grew up in Australia, studied finance at Georgetown, spoke five languages, and before he came to us, had worked for Action Against Hunger (ACF), a charity: water partner in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Five or six months before we hired him, Gumbley stomped into our office and demanded to speak to someone on our Program Finance team. He then berated us about a $1.08 million grant we’d just awarded ACF. “Look,” he said, “if we’re going to take this million dollars, you need to give me down-to-the-penny, specific parameters on how this money can and cannot be spent…or else we just cannot take it.” I think he even banged his fist on the table.
As Gumbley explained it, our contracts left too many details to chance, and our timelines and budgets were too simplistic. He wanted more clarity, because if our expectations of ACF weren’t clear from the outset, or if we thought ACF had spent the money irresponsibly, they could be at risk of a lawsuit. Of course we knew a thing or two about that.
I knew Gumbley would be a strong financial partner for our new Water Programs team lead, if I could just find the right person for that role. I’d spent all summer interviewing prospects, but no one seemed like a fit—that is, until our search firm found Christoph Gorder. The first time we met, he wore a suit and tie, which got him some strange looks as he walked through the office. But he seemed friendly and smart. Christoph and I met a few more times, and then Vik and I invited him and his wife, Alisha, to dinner. By mid-September, when I offered him the job, I think we both felt we’d gotten to know each other pretty well.
Christoph grew up in the Central African Republic, a tall, blond, blue-eyed son of Lutheran missionaries. As much as he probably stood out, he had a calm, easy manner and a knack for fitting in anywhere he went. We discovered that both he and I had attended NYU, and we also both spoke French—except that Christoph had gone on to get his master’s (in Spanish and Latin American literatures and cultures), and his French was a hundred times better than mine.
After college, Christoph went to work at Americares, an organization that provides emergency medical care and supplies to disaster zones. During his fourteen years there, he’d handled large-scale projects in more than a dozen countries, like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Southeast Asian tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. He oversaw 125 employees and was responsible for delivering billions of dollars in medical aid around the world.
Christoph had little direct experience with water, but he knew how to lead a team and empower people to do their jobs well. He seemed to be the whole package: experienced, hardworking, and optimistic. Best of all, we had chemistry.
Lauren would say that I lean too much on chemistry, that I’m prone to writing people off if I don’t feel it right away. She’s probably right, but when you’re spending hours upon hours crammed into Land Rovers and airplane seats next to your coworkers, they’d better be people you like. In October 2012, Christoph joined the charity: water executive team, leading Water Programs, sustainability, and many more projects in a crucial role that eventually came to be called chief global water officer.
Christoph and Michael Gumbley teamed up to formalize our partner protocols, tighten our contracts, revise our policies, and most important, scale the Water Programs and Programs Finance teams. Soon, we had about fifteen experts flying around the world with clipboards, auditing the quality of our projects and making sure the money was spent well. We were vetting our partners with precision, and eventually rolled out a website just for them (partner.charitywater.org), with hard-and-fast guidelines on everything from what we do and do not fund to how to measure impact, collect data, prepare budget templates, and more.
We also got really good at explaining our work to donors, and creating clear expectations. We built a public-facing site (support.charitywater.org) with answers to all sorts of questions, like “How did you calculate the cost of my project?” and “How do you choose your local partners?” And because maintaining the public’s trust is a core piece of our mission, we also explained how things can sometimes go wrong.
And we finally made headway on the sustainability initiative. The $5 million Google Award wasn’t used just for sensors—although that was the keystone. While Robert Lee was traveling around the world, meeting with hardware and software labs researching the sensors, Christoph’s team focused on developing new maintenance programs, like the ones in India that hired female mechanics. In Ethiopia, we funded training for seventeen mechanics who rode motorbikes across a service area of more than thirty-five hundred wells, keeping water flowing for over a million people. We brought mobile banking to Ugandan villages, which allowed water committees to issue payments for repairs online with increased transparency.
And when Robert discovered that the sensors we wanted for our wells literally didn’t exist, he met and spoke with labs in twelve different countries (including Mexico, China, and Spain), trying to find sensors in the oil, gas, and irrigation industries that could be adapted for water wells. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in creating what we needed; there just wasn’t a market for it. Think about it: Who’s going to buy something that tells you when your wells break? Who’s going to pay for bad news? We would, of course—or at least we tried to. We now knew we’d have to make a sensor ourselves. So Christoph and Robert hired engineers and a design firm to build it.
Meanwhile, just as our processes got more sophisticated, we were fundraising like gangbusters and pumping tens of millions of dollars (and counting) into the field.
“Our growth is crazy,” I’d told Christoph in my office during his first month. I took a marker and drew a quick chart for him on my whiteboard:
Then I drew an arrow up through the years and said, “If this continues, I think we’ll raise $100 million by 2016.”
“That’s a lot of wells,” Christoph joked.
But he knew it wasn’t just wells. We were actually funding eleven different solutions around the world, choosing them based on what worked best in a given region. In Cambodia, for example, there’s plenty of surface water, but it’s contaminated, so a more efficient option is to provide families with biosand filters, which purify dirty water through sand, gravel, and a biological film that eats away at harmful bacteria. In Tanzania, which has a short and heavy rainy season, we were funding rainwater harvesting systems that collect drinkable rainfall in sanitary holding tanks, so people can access it during the intense dry season. In places like Rwanda and Nepal, gravity-fed systems were the most cost-efficient way to collect, protect, and then pipe clean water from springs to access points. Plus, we were funding new million-dollar drilling rig packages for REST in Ethiopia, and maintaining hundreds of other wells around the world—including ones built by other organizations.
We were raising so much money that it felt like we might actually get clean water to everyone in my lifetime. Those numbers on the whiteboard proved it to me. Each year, as they rose, we got closer to our goal. Each year, they affirmed my worth as a leader.
In hindsight, I had no good way of forecasting our revenue. When I thought about our future, I’d always assumed that we’d grow indefinitely, scaling to $100 million and beyond. In truth, I was setting myself up for a fall.
In early November 2012, our attorney Chris Barton emailed me about a development in the lawsuit. He’d just gotten off a conference call with the opposing attorneys and the federal judge assigned to our case.
“Basically, the judge was angry at both parties for not settling,” Chris said. “He read through the lawsuit and couldn’t understand why this case was in his court at all.”
Trials are expensive for the government, and apparently the judge didn’t want to see taxpayer dollars being wasted on ours. So he’d ordered all the parties back to mediation, this time with a court-appointed magistrate in charge.
A new date was set for January 2013, in Los Angeles, where the case had originated. Chris and I would be present along with the insurance attorneys. Before booking our flights, we were told by the court, “Plan on spending the night in L.A.” In other words, don’t come in and tell the judge you’ve got a flight to catch, because no one was leaving until this thing was resolved.
The night before mediation, alone in my hotel room in Downtown L.A., I prayed for closure. I’d been living with this pain in my gut for fifteen months, hoping that somehow the donor would see how our organization was maturing and just drop the lawsuit. Even now, after all the exciting progress we’d made at charity: water, I still felt sick about the fact that someone hated me, that they would question my integrity.
I thought of my dad all those years ago, when he forgave the gas company for poisoning Mom. The strength it must have taken to do that, and not become bitter—that’s what I needed now: strength, forgiveness, something tangible that would help me to move forward.
On impulse, I opened up my laptop, went to the donor’s company website, and bought a leather wallet, a simple black trifold that cost about $55. Every time I look at that wallet, I thought to myself, I will remember the gift this lawsuit gave me. I’ll thank these people for forcing charity: water to operate with a higher level of accountability—for making us stronger and better.
In the morning, Chris and I walked together to the Downtown L.A. federal courthouse, an imposing 1930s-era structure with four grand white columns flanking the entrance. Inside, it looked like the building hadn’t been updated since the 1930s.
“I bought us tickets for the L.A. Philharmonic tonight,” Chris said. The Walt Disney Concert Hall was just a few blocks from the courthouse, and a twenty-four-year-old piano prodigy was performing selections from Rachmaninoff. It was a kind gesture on his part, an attempt to raise my spirits.
“That sounds great,” I said.
We met our court mediator, Judge Jay Gandhi, in his courtroom. He was tall, forty-something, and full of energy. I took his surname as a good omen. He ushered us into a dimly lit conference room with mismatched chairs and desks so haphazardly arranged that it looked like a graveyard for old furniture. The opposing side was sent to another room, down the hall.
For the first half of the day, Judge Gandhi listened to each side’s story. He asked questions about our work, about what had gone wrong in Kenya, and what we were ready to offer to settle this. I couldn’t get a read on the judge. Did he empathize with us, or did he think we were a bunch of frauds? It was hard to tell. He was so judgelike, so neutral in his delivery. Every hour or so, he’d say, “Okay, I’ll be back,” and then he’d go to talk with the other side.
In the past, we had agreed on at least one point—that charity: water would be willing to give money to another nonprofit for the purpose of drilling new wells in the donor’s name. Call it a do-over of sorts. But we couldn’t agree on things like how much money would be given, which charity would get the money, and whether we would pay that charity directly or give the money back to the donor.
I knew the courthouse shut down like clockwork at 5 p.m., so by 4:45, I was worried we were running out of time to reach a resolution.
Just then, the mediator walked in, sat down, and said, “We are going to settle this case.”
He placed a piece of paper firmly on the table in front of me. It was a settlement agreement typed out by his clerk, the details of which we’d been negotiating different versions of for the last hour.
“This is where we stand,” he said. So far, we’d agreed that charity: water would put money into a trust account to be paid directly to International Medical Corps, a nonprofit that would use the funds to bring clean water to people in need. We’d also agreed to remove any reference to the donor’s name from our website.
The final point to decide was the amount of money that charity: water would pay. Until now, we hadn’t even discussed it. There was a blank line where the dollar amount would go.
With a flourish, Judge Gandhi pulled out a pen and filled in the line. “If you agree to this number and sign this paper,” he said, “they’ll dismiss the suit.”
I looked down to see what he’d written. It read, “$1 million.”
He stood there with a pen in his hand, waiting for my response.
Okay, I thought. One million. That’s a lot of money. We’d gotten preapproval from the board to negotiate, but how would the sound of “$1 million” go down? I thought of how Michael and Xochi once gave us the same amount to keep charity: water alive, and how every penny of this would go toward providing clean water for people who had none. And wasn’t that the whole point? As long as this money went directly to fulfilling our mission, there was no downside for us.
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”
It was done. I signed and dated the agreement, and put my initials next to the “$1 million” commitment. I felt an immediate sense of peace, like a giant weight had been lifted off my back.
By 4:55 p.m., we were being ushered out of the room. I stopped to shake the mediator’s hand.
“I really appreciate your persistence today,” I said.
“You guys are doing good work,” he said. “Just keep going.”
“Thank you,” I said, barely getting the words out.
Outside, the sun was setting behind the L.A. skyline, turning the horizon red and gold. I breathed in the cool air like it was oxygen for my soul.