j. paul arterburn

charity: water caught my eye earlier this year as an organization that I felt was running their 501(c)(3) nonprofit the right way. There are a lot of different types of charities - many who also do amazing things, but what I really like about this particular one is how they provide long-term solutions as well as how the finances are handled.

charity: water makes it clear that they are not a relief organization (like, for example, Red Cross). When the earthquake hit Haiti and many people were in need of clean water, the organization directed them to their sister nonprofits who were more focused on providing immediate relief, however, charity: water now has wells in Haiti - which you can see because they tag each one with a GPS location on Google Maps.

Their finances work differently than any nonprofit I’ve seen as well. One of the goals of the then 30-year-old founder, Scott Harrison, was to not only to focus on providing a basic need to those who struggle to get it, but he wanted to add accountability to the process so every donor was able to understand every dollar was truly helping. So he setup the organization as two separate accounts: one to cover the costs of running it and another that goes towards building the wells. All public donations are sent to the latter and they take on private donations to cover the costs of administration salaries and even the transaction costs paid to the credit card companies. If you watch the video below you’ll hear Scott talk about how they went broke, but had millions of dollars in the donor account (the organization was saved by the founder of Bebo).

I work in a corporate office that has a very nice cafeteria which provides locally bottled water. What’s startling, however, is that in order to get to this bottled water people walk past a drinking fountain (filtered), a bathroom faucet, a sink faucet, a water/ice machine (also filtered), and a fountain drink machine that serves water. People say they like the taste of the bottled water. We apparently have 6 “flavors” of water to choose from just 30 steps from each other and 1 in 8 people worldwide don’t even have access to potable water.

My challenge to all of you is this:

I must admit, the thought of this challenge came after hearing about an 8-year-old who gave up her dinner and instead ate rice & beans for a month.

I was inspired to write this post after watching Scott give a presentation during Big Omaha in May of 2010. His “a ha” moment came after a friend bought him a $16 margarita in NYC - the same price that can feed a family in Liberia for a month.

I’m not the only one thinking about this issue - Matt Cuts, a famous Googler, just wrote a wonderful piece describing how he personally cares about charity:water as well as what Google is doing to help save clean water.