I have a friend who used to run a famous cancer charity. Sometimes we’d run into each other at conferences, and I once had to follow his talk.
He went onstage, in front of a thousand people, and said, “Raise your hand if you’ve had cancer? Go ahead and keep them up. Now, how about a family member? Okay, how about a friend?”
At “friend,” every hand in the audience was up. He then began his speech.
I have to admit, it made me jealous. If I were to go up after him and say, “How many of you have gotten deathly ill from drinking dirty water? Okay, how many of you know someone who died from waterborne disease?” or “How many of you have walked eight hours to get water?”
Crickets.
I’ve actually tried it. Sometimes, if it’s a huge group, I’ll see one or two hands in the audience, people who’ve immigrated to the United States from the places we work. But most Americans don’t know anyone who has died from schistosomiasis or diarrhea, or who’s gone blind from trachoma. They’ve never seen a child drink from a brown river and throw up on herself over and over again. They don’t know teenagers who’ve hanged themselves over spilled water. It’s hard to relate.
To celebrate the end of our tenth year, we wanted to create an even stronger connection between our donors and the recipients. Somehow, we wanted to eliminate the distance between New York City and Africa, and bridge that gap in a meaningful way at our 2016 charity: ball gala.
Back in August, as we were finalizing the Spring film, a small group of friends and Well members came to the office for a gala brainstorming session. Every year, we try to outdo the innovations of the previous year’s gala, but in 2016 the bar was set exceedingly high.
In 2015, we’d invited four hundred guests to a sit-down dinner in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur. After the meal, we strapped virtual reality headsets on everyone and simultaneously brought them into a thirteen-year-old girl’s life in Ethiopia for eight minutes. People in tuxedos and evening gowns were weeping when they took their headsets off, and we raised $2.4 million in one night. For our tenth anniversary, I knew we had to come up with something even more creative and exciting.
“We’re returning to the Met Museum,” I told the group. “And we want to give guests a chance to transform one single life. But we’re not sure how to create that one-to-one connection—that’s our challenge here.”
David Gungor, a musician and local pastor, riffed on an idea that got us excited.
“Think about your own life in the last ten years,” he said. “What were your biggest problems? What kept you up at night, worried for your family? Now imagine sitting down at the table at charity: ball and finding a video message from someone like you in Uganda. And learning that this person’s biggest problem in the last ten years was dirty water.”
The idea bounced around the room, getting bigger and more exciting with each person’s input. It boiled down to this: if our problem was getting people to relate, what if we could say to them, Look, here’s someone like you?
Someone Like You was a great concept, but to truly personalize it for every gala guest, we’d have to shoot four hundred photos and four hundred video stories of four hundred villagers in a single community that did not have water. Then we’d have to match up every villager in a meaningful way with each and every one of our four hundred guests—all while developing The Spring program, launching our holiday campaign, and putting on the gala itself. Even more daunting, we’d have only three months to pull the concept off. It was an insane idea. But that never stopped us before. We were all in.
We zeroed in on Ethiopia pretty quickly. Christoph’s team identified a handful of villages to scout, and our partners at REST helped us narrow it down to a remote community called Adi Etot, in the northwestern part of the country. Two months out of the year, during the rainy season, Adi Etot is flush with water. Teff fields sway in the breeze, golden rows of corn stretch across the horizon, and a natural spring seeps from a ravine at the center of the community. For a little while, collecting water is easy. But as the dry season approaches, the women and girls of Adi Etot must spend two to six hours a day collecting water from two alternate sources: a faraway spring or a nearby dirty riverbed.
For fifteen days in early October 2016, a small team of charity: water creatives made Adi Etot their home. During the first week, they camped in the village, drank coffee and ate meals with residents, and got to know people’s stories. Christoph and I flew out and joined them for the second week, where every day was spent in production.
Tyler Riewer conducted interviews with young single mothers, couples with children, students and teachers, farmers and aspiring entrepreneurs. Lauren and Ali Troute, our producer, sat at a table with their laptops, a list of questions, consent forms, and translators from REST. A generator whirred nonstop as they interviewed a long line of people from ages four to ninety, before sending them off to Paul and Jamie to be filmed. Finally, the residents were led over to Jeremy Snell, our freelance photographer, who took beautiful portraits of each and every person. The working days began at 5:30 a.m. and didn’t end until the sun went down.
As I walked from station to station, I knew that the people of Adi Etot would talk about this time for generations—that week when a bunch of crazy Americans came with their questions and their cameras, and soon after, we had clean water.
We came home with hard drives full of content. The next step was to find points of connection between each villager and each one of our four hundred charity: ball guests. Sabrina and her team created a spreadsheet to match guests with a counterpart in Adi Etot. Sometimes the commonalities were really specific: A pregnant donor was matched with a pregnant woman in Adi Etot of around the same age; or a couple who’d been married for forty years was connected to a couple in the village who’d been married for the same length of time. But for some, it was just “You’re a teacher and he’s a teacher,” or “Hey, you both like to take long hikes.”
Our team worked like crazy to finish the videos. Everyone was exhausted and cranky from managing so many moving parts. Lauren would push me to decide on details like the timing of my gala speech or the logistics around the “ask,” and I’d snap at her, “I’m not ready! I need more time to think.” She’d snap right back, “Fine. But the production will suffer if you keep pushing the deadlines!”
Then, just to make it a little more difficult for everyone, I decided that I wanted to cap the whole thing off with a live drill from Adi Etot. I imagined guests sitting down to dinner and learning about the person they’d been matched with. Then, from the stage, I’d invite them to change that person’s life right now. And we’d watch together as four hundred people got clean water for the first time in that very moment.
Charity: water had never actually done a live drill before. When you’re dealing with satellite equipment, drilling rigs, and unpredictable groundwater in remote locations, a million things can go wrong. So we’d always just filmed the drill and then immediately uploaded the video via satellite to New York.
When I ran the live-drill idea past Michael Birch and a few other Well members, their eyes lit up. I knew that if we pulled this off, it could be huge. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. A live drill would be the pièce de résistance for the gala—a powerful moment that people would remember, embrace, and share. It would also turn out to be a technical nightmare.
On December 5, the morning of charity: ball, 150 volunteers sat around our office customizing 400 iPads with the help of our engineering department. Ninety blocks north, in the Temple of Dendur, our event producers were running around with walkie-talkies, setting up the lighting and audiovisual systems and testing the satellite feed.
Four thousand miles away, Ali, Jamie, and Tyler were with REST’s drilling team in Adi Etot, pointing their broadband global area network (BGAN) satellite units toward the sky. But nothing appeared on our side. When we’d tested the link earlier, at the charity: water office, we’d gotten picture and sound in sync four out of seven times. But here in the Temple, hours before the moment of truth, our eighth and ninth tests failed completely. The sky in Ethiopia had grown too cloudy to transmit. We’d get picture but no sound, or we’d connect briefly and then the signal would drop. Tyler, who’d be on-camera live from Adi Etot, had been practicing his speech all night and was a nervous wreck.
By 6 p.m. we decided to just cross our fingers and hope for the best. It was 2 a.m. in Ethiopia. Our crew in-country settled in to sleep on blankets on top of their Land Rovers, next to the drill site. They’d wake up in a few hours to go live.
With guests starting to arrive, I went to find a place where I could sit alone and pray. I felt as ready as I ever do before these moments—which is to say, not at all. But I wanted to stop for a few minutes and thank God for giving me this opportunity—really, for giving me ten years of opportunities.
Just a year ago, I’d burned out to the point of quitting and then somehow had found my way back. Now I couldn’t wait to tackle year eleven.
As I quietly prayed, I thought about how dramatically my perspective had changed over the last ten years. There was a time when my mother’s illness felt like such a burden. Now I saw it as a gift. It taught me that, just like my father, I could endure pain, try harder, and find solutions where others saw only problems. I used to look back at the decade I spent in the clubs with shame and disgust. But I’ve realized that those experiences gave me skills (making people feel included, special, and united around a joyful experience) that I still use every day.
Tonight, I was doing the same thing I’d been doing for years: throwing a huge party. My endgame was the only thing that had changed.
The Temple of Dendur feels truly sacred at night. It’s a massive four-story room with views of Central Park through a wall of tilted glass windows, and we’d lit the whole place up with candles. The Temple itself is a sandstone Roman-era shrine to deities who ensured the prosperity of the community—the patrons of the people. As I looked around the hall from the table where Vik and I sat, I saw a lot of charity: water’s longtime friends and patrons in the room. Michael and Xochi, Shak, Neil, Matt, and Marissa. And newer friends, like Ryan and Molly, Julie and Brian.
No one knew what we had planned for the evening, which was all part of the excitement. A little after 9:30 p.m., after the dinner plates had been cleared, I got up to speak.
“Right now, about four thousand miles away from this stunning room, high up on a plateau in Shire, Ethiopia, is a community called Adi Etot, where the people are just waking up,” I said. “Several weeks ago, I joined our team in Adi Etot to listen to their stories. We heard about their hopes and dreams.”
Behind me, a two-story screen projected photos of the people we’d met.
“Here’s the oldest man in the village, a priest named Assefa Gebremedina. He’s either ninety-one or ninety-eight—nobody could seem to agree—and he told us he’s never had clean water before, but that he wanted to taste it before he died.”
I clicked to the next slide. “Here’s the youngest baby in the village,” I said. “She hasn’t even been named yet! She’s almost the exact age as my daughter. Her mother told us that she bathes her only every other week. But if she had clean water, then her baby could take a bath every day.”
The screen cycled through images of the rocky ravine where the women of Adi Etot waited with donkeys and Jerry Cans for a trickle of dirty water. And then, the place where they had to dig in the dry season when the streams disappeared.
“We know that sometimes when you give to charity, it can be hard to imagine the exact person you’re helping,” I said. “But not tonight. Because every single person in Adi Etot has a story. And every one of you is about to meet your person.”
Each guest had an iPad in front of them at their table, with their name displayed on the home screen. I asked everyone to pick up their iPad, swipe left, and use the code “together” to unlock the experience and meet their person.
I watched as guests thumbed through their tablets and discovered with surprise that they’d been matched with a unique person in Ethiopia. One friend, Monique, a jewelry designer, teared up after seeing a video of her person and recalling a trip she’d taken to the field with us many years before.
After about ten minutes, I told everyone that tonight we were going to raise money to drill a well for Adi Etot.
“It’s going to cost $12,000, which breaks down to $30 per person,” I said. “Now, if anyone is unable to give, Vik and I will make up the difference. But I’d really love to see 100 percent participation tonight.”
It was fun to look across the room and see so many shocked and confused faces: Just $30? That is too low. It doesn’t even cover the cost of my dinner!
But those who knew me well were chuckling, and warning the others, “Just you wait. He’s not done with us yet.”
“Are you ready?” I said. “Let’s do this!”
The giant screen behind me switched to a grid of the four hundred faces of the villagers. As donations rolled in, each person’s face turned from black and white to color. We raised $12,000 in about three minutes. I could hardly contain my excitement.
“I knew you guys would do that,” I said. “So, in good faith, we’ve already dispatched a charity: water rig to Adi Etot, and yesterday it began drilling the well you just paid for.”
Clapping and cheering broke out across the room.
“Our partners in Ethiopia have been drilling through the night, and a few hours ago, we learned that they found clean water two hundred feet underground,” I continued. “Guys, people in this village have been waiting their entire lives for this moment.”
My palms got sweaty and my heart rate doubled. I had no idea if this was going to work. There were so many things that could go wrong. But it was 10:12 p.m. in New York and 6:12 a.m. in Ethiopia. Now or never.
“Can we please open up the satellite link to Ethiopia?” I called out, waiting and praying that we’d see Tyler and the people of Adi Etot appear behind me on the giant screen. I held my breath.
And then, there they were.
Standing on a high plateau in the morning’s first light was Tyler, a drilling rig, and a sea of people wrapped up in white blankets and looking awfully cold, but visibly bouncing with energy. Everyone in the Temple clapped and cheered. These were their people.
“I’m standing here in the middle of Adi Etot, along with nearly every single one of the four hundred people you met tonight,” Tyler began. He sounded great! The video was clear. And his speech delivery was pretty confident, considering the fact that our feed was only one way. The whole time he was talking, he had no idea if anyone in New York could see or hear him. He was driving blind.
“The next step here is to flush the well,” Tyler continued. “Let’s watch together.” As the camera panned and the drill team fired up the rig, I prayed that we’d see water. What none of us knew at the time was that the rig’s compressor had run out of oil. It had one more flush in it, and then it was done. We literally had one shot here.
It was so quiet in the Temple that I could hear the ice clinking in glasses. And then, suddenly, on-screen, as everyone was watching, a stream of water shot thirty feet into the air. It looked like a geyser erupting. The kids in Adi Etot were jumping up and down and rushing toward the water, letting their blankets get wet. The women sang and danced. From the oldest man, who thought he’d never see clean water, to the youngest child, everyone on that mountaintop was celebrating.
I looked out from the stage at all the guests. They were clapping, too, and some were even crying. They cheered so loudly it filled the Temple and bounced off the walls. I couldn’t hear anything else. But I could see our donors smiling at one another and mouthing the word amazing.
They could relate.
Tears streamed down my face. I looked over at Vik, who was wiping her eyes. Every person in this room was now connected to someone like them a world away. Now it was time to make a bigger ask.
“I know that many of you came here tonight prepared to give more than just one person clean water,” I said. “I want to see if we can do the same thing for one hundred thousand people living in three hundred villages all over the world. To do that, we’ll need to raise $3 million.”
I then announced that a group of eighteen donors had already put up $1 million to help us reach our goal—but it would be unlocked only if we could raise the first million.
“Vik and I will pledge $10,000 of our own money to start,” I said. “This isn’t a competition, and we’re not selling you anything. We’re just offering you a pure opportunity to help as many people as you can.”
A giving counter lit up the giant screen behind me.
“We have fifteen minutes to raise $3 million,” I said. “Let the giving begin!”
There was so much joy in the room as the numbers rose and rose…from $10,000 to $20,000 then $150,000, then to $1 million. People kept pledging and then pledging more. It was the best party I’d ever thrown in my life.
Less than fifteen minutes later, we had raised a total of $3.1 million. We’d done it: one hundred thousand lives changed in a moment. Remembering what Ross had taught me, I looked around the room, inhaled deeply, took a mental picture of the scene, and stored it away in my heart and mind.
I was so proud of our team. This is what charity: water is all about, I thought. Tonight, we didn’t just help another 310 communities get clean water. We also brought great joy to 400 people here in New York. We proved that pure giving—the kind that comes from deep within your heart, the kind where you expect nothing in return—can be a powerful and life-changing experience.
Tomorrow, I would go back to work and try to do it all over again.