A Bit of Optimism - Redemption with charity founder Scott Harrison

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Life as a nightclub promoter in New York City was an unending cycle of drinking, drugs, models, and fast cars. After ten years, Scott Harrison's vices caught up with him, and a health scare forced him to reflect on his life.Scott felt decadent, wasteful, and morally bankrupt. He decided to completely reverse course. Scott spent the next 2 years in West Africa on board a nonprofit hospital ship, where he saw a level of human suffering that led him to his true calling.Today, solving the global water crisis is Scott's life's work, and he's built one of the most trusted nonprofits in the world to do just that. His organization charity: water has raised over $750 million, helping more than 17.4 million people access clean drinking water.Scott shares with me the painful road that led to his transformation and why living a life of service can be a path toward redemption.This...is A Bit of Optimism If you would like to help solve the global water crisis, visit:charitywater.org For more on Scott, check out:his book Thirst 

A lot of people are cynical about charity and charitable giving, and they have every right to be. So much of our money that we give to charity never makes it to the cause. In fact, only a small percentage often does. Too much goes to the overhead, disproportionately high. Scott Harrison is the founder of Charity Water, and they are the complete opposite. He figured out a model where 100% of public donations goes directly to the cause, but that's only a part of the story. What makes Scott remarkable is his journey of someone who lived a decadent, wasteful, and selfish life and completely converted to a life of service. This is a bit of optimism.

Scott, it is so good to see you. You're one of my favorite people in the world. so good to see you. You're one of my favorite people in the world. Every time I talk to you, I walk away enriched and inspired. You are not like the standard person in your industry, which is a good thing. And the industry you're in is charity. Non-profit. Even the industry starts out with- I know. They define themselves by what they're not. I know. You wear black, you're buttoned up all the way to the top because you're cool. I'm just cold. It's cold here. Your wife is a globally recognized famous designer. I mean, you should be in tech or some cool creative industry, but you went into charity. I mean, I know your story.

It didn't start out that way. It didn't start out that way. Look, I think my life is kind of three acts. I was born in a very middle-class family in Philadelphia. My dad was a business guy. My mom was a writer for the newspaper. And when I was four, there was this really formative tragedy that happened. There was a carbon monoxide gas leak in our home. And on New Year's Day, 1980, my mother collapses unconscious on the bedroom floor. So she was the canary in the coal mine, which led to visits from the gas company, detectors, finally the discovery of huge amounts of carbon dioxide in her bloodstream. And then the actual leak, which was this furnace in the basement that was just improperly installed.

And had this continued, we all could have died. my dad and I had a bunch of symptoms we wound up bouncing back and my mom never did so she became permanently disabled she was an invalid for the rest of my life and what happened to her was her immune system just irreparably shut down and it just was unable to process the world anything chemical you. If it was a car fume, it would knock her out. If it was perfume or soap or the ink from books would make her sick. And what this resulted in was just her living in isolation, basically. So she would live in these special rooms covered in tinfoil and she would sleep on army cots that were washed in baking soda 20 times. And she wore masks. So I just never saw my mom's face. It was always covered with a 3M mask, some version of the N95, and she would cycle

and try them all. So I grew up as an only child in a very religious, conservative Christian home. And I grew up in this, in the church. I wanted to be a doctor. And if you'd asked me in childhood, you know, Scott, what are you going to be when you grow up? I was going to cure my mom and I was going to cure all the other sick people that I'd met with a similar condition. And I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. I didn't do drugs. I didn't curse.

And I didn't sleep around. So that was act one. I think people know where this is going. I mean, this setup is amazing for this beautiful child. Open act two. Open act two. Then act two happened. And then act two happened. And act two was this radical rebellion moment where I woke up one day and said, no, I'm not going to be a doctor. I'm not going to be a good church kid. I want to have

sex. I want to try drugs. I want to drink. I want to smoke. I want to travel the world. I want to drive a fast car. I want a Rolex watch. I want to date supermodels. And I actually found there was a job where you could have a shot at many of these things. And it was called a nightclub promoter. And if you could get the right people inside the right New York City clubs, and if you could kind of orchestrate this magic past the velvet rope, past the one-way glass, you could charge people astronomical amounts to buy drinks. You could sell a $1,000 bottle of champagne that only cost you $40. You could sell a $25 vodka Red Bull that cost you $0.25 to make.

So to the horror of my parents, to the horror of their church friends, So to the horror of my parents, to the horror of their church friends, I moved to New York City at 18 and I joined a band. I grow my hair down on my shoulder. You know, the'm climbing up New York City social ladder. I probably got to top eight. There were eight of us running nightlife in New York City. But over the 10 years, it was a selfish life. I did start smoking two packs a day. I did start drinking heavily. I did start with marijuana and then cocaine and MDMA and ecstasy. And I had a gambling problem. I had a pornography problem, kind of all of the vices that you might imagine would come with a job where you go to the club at midnight and then you go to the after hours at 5am. And then you go home at noon and pop a couple Ambien, you know, to try to put yourself to sleep while other people are on their lunch break eating salads. So if you looked at me at 28, I had some of these markers of success that I'd

collected. I had the BMW. I had the Rolex watch. My girlfriend was on the cover of fashion magazines. I had a nice loft in New York City with the grand piano. And I was just the worst person you would have met. I was a hedonist. I was a decadent, selfish, sycophant. I was emotionally bankrupt. I was morally bankrupt. I was spiritually bankrupt. I mean, my life was unrecognizable from this young kid who wanted to be a doctor and serve his mom and serve others. who wanted to be a doctor and serve his mom and serve others. And what happened, really, I don't get to tell this story all the time, but one day half my body just inexplicably went numb. And I remember... I don't think of it as inexplicable. Well, that's what my friend said.

You know, for me, it was inexplicable, Simon. I was going to live forever. I mean, you know, I was on top of the world. I'm in the, I'm in the DJ booth, spraying champagne down over the crowd. Okay. While some Paris DJ flew in. So for me, it was inexplicable. And yeah, you're right. My club partner was like, bro, you know, no wonder your body's breaking down. I mean, I saw what you did last night. So I think what was so powerful for me was I was forced. I was faced with mortality almost instantly. You know, what if I have a brain tumor?

Why can't I feel my arms and my legs? I remember putting my right arm under boiling hot water. I could see the steam coming up and I couldn't feel it. And I just thought, well, I'm going to die. And if I die, like, what are they going to say about me? What are they going to put on my tombstone? And the only thing I could come up with is, you know, here lies a club promoter who got a million people wasted. And that was my legacy, was getting people drunk. girls and he drove a car and he had a watch. And I think I just realized, oh my gosh, I am in the proverbial pigstead. I am kind of covered in feces. And I got to make a change. I got to do something. I got to try to find my way back. I got to find my way back home. And I remember going into the doctors and I got the MRIs and

the brain scans and the CT scans and the EKGs and nobody could find anything physically wrong with me. There was no brain tumor. But for me, I think maybe I over-spiritualized it, but I thought it was a wake-up call to assess my life and what would be next. And I remember I started praying again. I remember starting to go back to church in New York City and the churches were meeting in these fluorescent lit cafeterias and the music was awful. And I remember reading the Bible again and I came to this verse in James where it said, true religion is to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep yourself from being polluted by the world. And I was like, I'm over to. Right.

I mean, I have done nothing for anyone in 10 years. And not only am I polluted, I'm actually polluting others for a living. And this led to, I guess, act three and being a pretty radical guy. I got this idea that I would tithe, which was this concept I'd grown up with in the church was to give 10%. And typically you tithe your money. I said, I'm going to tithe my time. I'm going to give one year of the 10 years that I have wasted. And I'm going to go see if I can be useful. Can I be useful to others? And my idea was simply to volunteer on some sort of humanitarian mission and see where that took me and see if any of my skills could be useful. I was all excited. I sell everything I own. I'm going to start life over at 28. And I apply to the Red Cross. And I apply to Save the Children and Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders and 10 organizations that I tangentially heard of. And I'm denied by all 10 organizations. It turns out Doctors Without Borders is looking for actual doctors, not night

club promoters for their mission. So I remember just being so deflated. The hard part was me changing the intention of my life. Here I want to go and nobody will take me. And I think it was the 11th or the 12th organization wound up writing me back and said, hey, Scott, if you're willing to pay us $500 a month, and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world at the time, which was Liberia, West Africa. And Simon, I could not have found Liberia on a map. I had never heard of Liberia before. And they said, well, we're going on a medical mission to Liberia. We're looking for a photojournalist.

I had actually kind of part-time limped through New York University and gotten a degree in communications that I'd never used so I dust that off and I say I can take pictures and I can write and they said we'll take you on this mission for one year and I mean in some ways it was the perfect opposite of my life go to the poorest country in the world, pay every single month for the pleasure of volunteering, and then see if I could be useful. And that really started act three at 28 years old. And I was going to be living on a 522 foot hospital ship. This was a 50 year old ship that used to sail and it had been gutted and turned into a state of the art hospital. But it was a really old ship. And it was a simple idea. This charity brought the best doctors and surgeons on their vacation time

and sailed a hospital ship up and down the coast of Africa and just offered free medical care. So I went like all in. I surrendered my passport and they started billing me $500 a month. And that started a whole new journey. My third day there, Simon, so we would, the way that this worked is that the ship was going to be coming in 350 volunteer crew, 40 bed hospital, three operating theaters, and a small team, an advanced team had flyered the

whole country looking for sick people. And we would say on this day, sick people turn up and the doctors will triage you. And I remember when we came into the port, I learned that the government had given us the soccer stadium, the kind of decrepit football stadium in the center of the city to triage the patients. And I knew that we had 1500 available surgery slots to fill over the next eight months. And, you know, I remember getting up at five in the morning, it was still dark. I put on the hospital scrubs. I grabbed my two Nikon D1X digital cameras. This was the brand new era of digital cameras. And I jumped in this convoy of Land Rovers with the doctors and the nurses, and we snaked through the city. And as we get to the stadium, there are 5,000 sick people standing in the parking lot waiting just weeping, you know, realizing 3,500 sick people were going to be sent home without care. I later learned many of these people had walked

for more than a month. They'd walked from other countries, from Sierra Leone, from Cote d'Ivoire, from Guinea, just in the hope of seeing a doctor, some with their kids in tow. And we didn't have enough doctors. We didn't have enough resources. And that was so animating for me, I think. And just so opposite of my life of the previous 10 years. Can you share one story from the ship over that year that really captures the impact? Well, the first boy that I actually photographed was a 14-year-old boy named Alfred. And if I'm describing him as I saw him, he is this very thin West African child, and he has a volleyball-sized pink tumor occupying his mouth. Had a hard time breathing, had a hard time eating. And his mom actually came in tow with a picture of her son four years previous at 10 years old.

And he looked like my 10-year-old. He looked completely normal. And as she started to tell his story through a translator, she said, this know, this, this small lump started growing and then it got bigger and there was no surgeon to take her son to. And it just continued to grow and grow and grow and grow. And four years later, you know, at the front of the line, she was smart to bring him there a couple of days early so that he'd be seen. I'm, I'm face to face with this 14 year old child who is suffocating to death on his own face in front of me. And I've never seen anything like this before. And he was terrified and I was terrified. And I remember going in the corner and just kind of breaking down.

Like, I don't know that I can do this. I've never seen suffering like this before. And, you know, knowing there were 1,499 people behind him and my job was going to be to photograph everybody up close and personal for the medical library with their deformity, with their conditions. And one of the doctors came over and kind of kicked me in the butt and he's like, kid, I thought you were from New York city. You know, they don't make them tougher than that in New York, you know, get back there, go do your job. And Hey, by the way, we're going to, we're here to help this

kid. This kid's going to be fine. And I managed to get through those two days of screening, taking 1,500 people, seeing far worse than Alfred, people with missing faces, people who had been burned beyond recognition by rebel soldiers who poured oil on their faces, hoping to disfigure them. And then a couple of days later, I did get to see Alfred's surgery. And I watched Dr. Gary meticulously remove the tumor, reconstruct his jaw, reconstruct his face. And I got to watch him heal on the ward. And then I remember asking, I said, hey, can I personally drive Alfred home to his village? It was a couple hours away. I wanted to see the whole thing

from beginning to middle to end. And I'll never forget, you know, jumping out of the Land Rover and I was rolling video and Alfred is just surrounded in his village by hundreds of people who had written this little boy off for dead. They thought he was cursed. He had done something, obviously, to offend the gods, right?

That's why something was growing on his face. And just here he is, restored to health and restored to life. And it was just such a powerful... And that happened because these doctors had said yes, because they had come. Instead of going to the Maldives, which they certainly could have afforded as surgeons. They decided to go to Liberia for a month. So I saw a version of that story on repeat, you know, time and time again. I remember just

one other short one. We did cataract surgeries. I remember meeting this woman. She was 25 years surgeries. I remember meeting this woman, she was 25 years old and she couldn't see, but she was born with sight. And these severe cataracts had developed over the last eight years or so. So she goes blind at 17. And she'd since gotten married and actually had a daughter and she'd never seen her daughter. And I remember being in the operating theater, Simon, thinking, oh my gosh, I could do this cataract surgery. It was like 10 minutes. I took a scalpel and he cut the side of the eye and he stuck in some tweezers and he pulled out the cataract and he put a new lens in and that was it. I think it was like 10 or 15 minutes. And again, I wanted to be there to capture the moment when she could see again.

So a couple days later, I had my camera and they removed the patch and she could see again. So a couple of days later, I had my camera and they removed the patch and she could see, and she started screaming. She tackled me. She tackled the nurse. You know, she's dancing and screaming. She could see her daughter. She could see her sister. And I just remember thinking, I mean, I think this costs $280. This is less than a bottle of vodka in a club. Yeah. It really makes us question our values, doesn't it? How can it not? You finished the year, Scott.

What happens? I just wanted more. I just wanted more. I didn't want that to end. I didn't want being around these people, self-sacrificing people, stories, miracles, medical miracles. I didn't want it to end. So I came back to New York. The ship took a couple months off where they would dry dock it and they would kind of outfit it for the next mission. And that second year for me was really more of the same, taking more patients home, watching their lives being transformed. I'd gotten exposed to so much, but I remember seeing in the second year, a child drank dirty water in a village. And this was a 10-year-old, 13-year-old girl. Her name was Hawa. And she walked into this green, murky swamp that you could see the bugs. You could actually see insects in the swamp.

And she just takes a drink from the swamp. And, you know, I'm talking to her and I realize this is the only water, this disgusting water that I wouldn't let my dog drink. The only water that she had ever experienced in her entire life. She drank this water. She bathed with this water. She washed her clothes with this water. She cooked with this water. And, you know, I remember just kind of being so shocked, like, oh my gosh, like she's drinking dirty water. And then I started to pull on that string and I went into more villages and I saw that so many of these villages didn't have clean water. They were drinking from a version of that dirty swamp.

And I learned two very simple things, which kind of propelled me into, you know, the start of charity water. I learned that half of the country was drinking dirty water. So half of the country was drinking contaminated water every day. And then I learned, according to the World Health Organization, half of the disease in the country was because people were drinking dirty water and didn't have access to sanitation and hygiene. And I remember showing Dr. Gary my pictures from these remote villages as he was in scrubs and in the operating theater. And, you know, he kind of said, yeah, we know. We know. Why don't you go do something about it? Why don't you go? You try to bring water and eliminate half the diseases. Exactly. And I think I just I did the math and I said, well, if these people had water, there wouldn't be 5000 people standing in a parking lot, there'd be 2,500 people, maybe even less. And it was sort

of that eureka moment, that discovery of, well, the root cause of so much of this sickness is something so basic. And then yet at the time, Simon, 1 billion people in the world, one out of six people alive didn't have access to it. And so Gary, kind of my, you know, my guide after two years just says, kid, you're 30 years old. You know, sure, you could help us continue to fund expensive surgeries on the ship. Or you could just go and get the whole world clean water. I was like, okay, I will just go get the whole world clean water. And that ended the time with Mercy Ships. And I came back to New York and I was completely broke. I was exactly 30.

I had given all my money to Mercy Ships and the people that I'd met in Africa. And nightclub promoters are not good savers anyway or investors, right? So, you know, I really was starting from zero. And my old promoting friend took me in and let me live on his closet floor in Soho on Spring and Mercer in Manhattan. And that was really the start of Charity Water, was this call from Dr. Gary. It was trying to do something about the two years and everything that I'd seen, and then trying to start an organization to actually bring clean water to a billion people. So let's just flash forward to current day. How old is Charity Water now?

We're 17 years old. So you've been doing this for the past 17 years. How many wells have you built around the world? Over 150,000. 150,000 wells. You have top marks in Charity Navigator. And for a very specific reason, because you developed a model, because you know the cynicism of where money goes in charities, and so much of it goes to overhead, and so little of it goes to the cause. And an abysmally small amount of money that we give to these famous charities goes to the actual cause. What percentage at charity order of outside donated money goes directly to building wells? 100%. 100%.

100%. So, I mean, this, I think, you know, in the founding moment, I had the advantage of not knowing any better, Simon. I mean, I picked up HTML. I picked up HTML for dummies because I was going to have to build a website. And I picked up how to start a charity for dummies, you know, 501c3s for dummy. And what I did have the advantage, I think, as so many entrepreneurs or people who are just trying to solve problems in the world,

is I was just talking to my friends and everyday people. And I realized everything you just said, there was a cynicism, there was a skepticism about charity. And I thought, well, you know, I would ask people, what would the perfect charity look like? What would, because everybody loved the issue, right? When I'm, when I said, hey, I'm on I would ask people, what would the perfect charity look like? What would, because everybody loved the issue, right? When I said, hey, I'm on a mission to bring clean water to everybody in the world. I mean, no one was saying wrong goal or dumb idea. You know, nobody was saying, let them drink bad water and die. But it was the construct people had a problem with.

So I remember just saying, like, what would the perfect charity look like? And a lot of people just said, well, I'd know that all my money actually went to help people. Well, now that's actually impractical because the charity does have costs and you have to pay your team members and you have to take flights to develop programs and need an office. If you're working out of an office and an insurance and toner for the Epson copy machine. Right. But I remember just thinking, well, what if I opened up a separate bank account and I got a very different group of people to pay the unsexiest overhead costs? What if I went to entrepreneurs, to people who had built businesses? And that would never be the public's problem. And so that's what it looked like. Not knowing any better, I opened up two separate bank accounts,

the public bank account, which we called the water account, and then the overhead account. I think there was a couple hundred dollars in each and said, never the two should meet. This is going to be church and state. And I remember having this idea that felt like a good idea then, and I've regretted many times since, but I said, well, even get a payback credit card fees so that there's total integrity in the 100%. So if Simon goes on right now and he pulls out his Amex and he gives $100, sadly, we get $97. I said, we're going to go and raise that Amex transaction fee, that $3, and we'll put it back together with the $97. And we're going to send Simon's whole intended $100 to the field. That was great when you're not at scale.

So that was kind of the first big pillar. And then the second thing just built on that, well, if money's not fungible, couldn't we build technology to actually track these donations and show people where they ended up? Couldn't we show Simon that his $100 ended up in this village in Southern Malawi? And couldn't we show him the satellite image on Google Earth and Google Maps after that project was built? So we started to kind of build this second pillar, which turned out to be very unique to Charity Water, which was proof, closing the loop, showing people where their money went, where 100% of their money went. I need to double click on this. I need to underscore what you're doing here. Two bank accounts, a small group of wealthy individuals who commit to pay for your overhead.

Yep. So that every public donation, 100% of public donation goes directly to the cause. And you will follow that money and you will show somebody, you will give somebody the GPS coordinates, they can go on Google Earth and they can literally see a photograph of the exact well that their money bought. I mean-

That's what we built. And that to me, it's so genius in its simplicity that it answers every cynicism question that people ask about charities. And it simply does the thing that nobody else has ever done, which is where does my money go? How do I know? I will say sometimes charities spend too little on their operating costs and they actually don't run great programs. We just said there's a group of people who we think we can inspire and get excited about paying those

operating costs. So therefore, really, the disenfranchised, skeptical, cynical public at large can give in the purest way. And we take this really far, Simon. We've forced our auditors, KPMG, to write an opinion about the 100% model every single year. So that's posted on our website. You cannot go on Charity Water on any page on our website, of which there's thousands, and find any way to donate to Overhead. You literally have to document it with a paper trail if we put it into that Overhead account. So we've really tried to, because a lot of people say, do they really do it?

No, we actually do it. When you started Charity Water 17 tried to, because a lot of people say, oh, do they really do it? No, we actually do it. When you started Charity Water 17 years ago, there were a billion people who needed clean water. How many today? Yep. We're down to 700 million on a 7 billion plus population. So we've gone from one in six in the world to one in 10 in the world. So we've made a lot of progress. I think it's our job to show that this is a solvable problem. The tension though, Simon, is like, oh my gosh, how come we haven't done it? I mean, 700 million people is twice the population of the United States. So it's a huge, huge group of people. And we have not created the will to solve this problem yet. We have not come together and mobilize the resources. But what's great about water is it is completely solvable. My mother eventually passed away from pancreatic cancer, late stage pancreatic cancer. The doctors

had absolutely no idea how to help her. We have friends that are suffering from Parkinson's, from ALS, right? Billions of dollars are being spent to hopefully unlock the cure for these diseases, which is unknown whether we actually get there. Water's not like that. Like we have the cure. It's called clean water. In the West, you know, we have so much clean water that we fill our toilets with potable water. Like we don't mind if the drug drinks from the toilet. It's a, it's a, you know, I mean, you could drink from the toilet. It's a gross thought, but

the water is clean in our toilets because it's too expensive to put two sets of pipes in. So we're just like, eh, just literally flush drinkable water. And so it's so abundant to the point of waste that it doesn't affect us. And I think the story for me is not can you sympathize with somebody with no water? Some people can, but that's not enough people, right? Because more people's families are affected by cancer than dirty water in the West, which is the source of your income. For me, this is a bigger story. This is a call to service.

You had to go to an extreme near-death hedonistic life to have a come to Jesus moment, literally and figuratively. What you discovered was the intense, intense joy of service that no drug, no alcohol, no model, no watch, no car. None of that was ever able to replicate that feeling. And that's the thing. I think we've confused the thrill of life, the thrills. We've confused the thrills of life with the joy of life, right? The watch is a thrill. The car is a thrill.

Winning, getting a promotion, getting a raise, they're all thrills. And those thrills die pretty quickly, which is why we keep trying to find another thrill. And we think we're living happy lives by simply repeating thrill after thrill and needing to find bigger and bigger thrills. And it's incredibly unfulfilling. Joy. Joy is sustainable. It comes with difficult days. It comes with fun days. It comes with days that are thrilling and days that are just boring, but it's just sustainable. And the analogy is we don't like our children every day, but we love our children every day. And many of us are trying to find ways to like life, but we don't love life. Nothing can recreate the intense feeling of service to another.

And I've had my experiences and the path that I'm on is because I too realize that the intensity and the feeling of service, that no thrill that I can buy or achieve can ever come close. I think you might've said to me many years ago, and I've used this line on stage multiple times, the more you give, the more you give. Yeah. This is something, it's almost like a muscle. When you work it, you want to give more. The more you serve, the more you serve. You invented something, which I think has been repeated by other charities. And I think it should be because it's a brilliant idea, which is you figure it out how to give people that sense of joy and service, not just from opening their wallets, but by doing service. And this is about,

you invented the concept of donating your birthday. So donating your birthday is super simple, which is it's turnkey-ish, but you don't make it easy. They have to do some work and they have to call their friends and say, instead of giving me a present, if I'm turning 12 years old, I want you to donate $12 to Charity Water.

I'm raising money and I'm donating my birthday. And you've had children raise thousands of dollars. My gosh. My gosh. My gosh. So, you know, this is what happened. I think the big idea, too, was your agent dollars. That was the sticky marketing message. So someone would turn 17 and they would ask for $17.

Someone would turn 52 and they would ask for $52 from everybody they know. And yeah, I mean, you know this story. You were really around at the time. So many children were doing this all over the country. And there was this one little girl in Seattle. And gosh, I haven't told this story in a while. And it still makes me emotional. Her name was Rachel Beckwith. And she was eight when she'd heard me speak and talk about this birthday idea. So she cancels her ninth birthday. She does not accept any gifts. And she sets out to raise $300, which at the time would

help 10 people get clean water. And, you know, this is a compassionate kid. She'd heard the kids were dying of cancer. She cut her hair, you know, the year before and donated it to Locks of Love. cut her hair the year before and donated it to Locks of Love. So this was a girl who got it. And she only raises $220. And she feels like she has let children down in Africa because she did not hit her goal. And a couple of weeks later, unfortunately, there's this terrible 15-car pileup on the interstate and she's killed in a car crash. And she's the only fatality. Her mom was driving. Her sister was in the front. She was in the backseat and a tractor trailer smashed into the car. And I remember I was in Central African Republic at the time. I landed at JFK. I turned my BlackBerry on and her pastor had emailed and said, hey, it was a little girl in

my church. She donated her birthday to Charity Water. Her campaign closed. She fell a little short. Would you please open that campaign again? She's just tragically passed, and we'd like to honor her memory. We reopened the campaign, and I just remember giving $80 with tears streaming down my eyes to this little nine-year-old girl's campaign who is no longer alive. And then this pastor started putting it out and he asked everybody in his church to donate $9. And it started to spread through the Seattle community. The New York Times got ahold of it. Nick Kristof did a column.

The morning shows starts to spread into Europe. The story of a nine-year-old girl who canceled her birthday and wanted kids to have clean water. Simon, the most remarkable thing was I remember people in Africa start giving. People in Africa start going on our website and giving $9. She winds up posthumously raising $1.3 million. And I remember meeting her mom for the first time a few weeks after this.

And I just kind of blurted out to her mom. I said, you need to spend the one-year anniversary of Rachel's death with me. We're going to go to Ethiopia. And you're going to meet thousands of children who now have life, who now have water because of your special daughter. And a year later, she came with me with Rachel's grandparents, and we went village to village. And it was an unbelievable thing kind of seeing the impact of that. First of all, the compassion.

And then the service. She actually had to do something. She had to make a sacrifice. You know, girls nine years old are supposed to want stuff for their birthday. And she wanted something for others. And I remember being in one of the village assignments and these elder women, these Ethiopian women came and they fell prostrate at Rachel's mom's feet

and they were just weeping. And, you know, they say through a translator, we also know pain. We have lost children, but your daughter's death gave our children life. And it was just so, so meaningful. And then what was even cooler is a couple years later, I asked the engineering team to pull the data set. So many people who gave $9 to her campaign, then followed her lead, donated their birthday. They raised another two, two and a half million dollars or so. So this little girl went from a goal of $300 that she didn't achieve while alive, and then raised over $3 million, inspiring complete strangers across the globe to give. So that was the power of that idea. You know, people donating their birthdays, people, you know, running campaigns,

you know, they've contributed over a hundred million dollars now for clean water, kind of as people say, I can do this, I can do this one thing and make a difference for somebody, for one family, for one village. I think what inspires me, and I said it before, what inspires me about you and about Charity Water, which is whether water is your thing or not, it's your call to service that I find so powerful. And I've known you a lot of years. I've known you a lot of years when Charity Warder was much smaller. You are the most consistent person I know in my life who in the 17 years that you've been doing this in the over a decade that I've known you, you're only, you're as passionate today as you were, you, as you were then you're unwavering.

Many, many years ago, someone sent me a picture from a New York city deli, and it was from some ancient text. And it was in those, you know, one of those boards where you kind of put up the letters and it said, do not be afraid of work with no end. Do not be afraid of endless work. And, you know, I remember thinking about that for years and, and, and, you know, that kind of idea, cause, cause it's a big problem we're solving. I mean, it seems almost unachievable, you know, 700 million people we've helped 18 million people. Okay. So my, you We've helped 18 million people.

Okay. So the 18 million people Charity Water has helped, you put that into the problem, it's 139. It's 2.6% of the weighted goal. But I've really come to think that that is much more of a way of life. If you are asking the question daily, how do I use my time, my talent, my money in the service of others? There is no finish line. There is no drop the mic moment. It is a way of life. It is a way of service. Because there's so much left to be done. There's so much left to be done.

You know, 139th. I'd like to have more than a 139th or 2.6% impact on the global water crisis. But if we see a day on earth when everybody has clean water, we're not going to go drop the mic and try and get rich. We would look at the other problems and say, is someone hungry? Is someone going to bed with a roof, without a roof over their head, with a leaking house? Is a mother right now watching a child die in her arms because she doesn't have access to healthcare? Let's take our whole community. Let's take all of the generous people we have built trust with over three, four, five decades and say, hey, what else could we do together? three, four, five decades and say, hey, what else could we do together? What other needless suffering could we stand in the gap for? How else could we use our time and our talent and our money? So there's no end point. Scott, I could talk to you for hours. Unfortunately, we would be forcing people to listen to it. I think they've had quite enough of us.

I'm grateful you exist. I'm grateful for your hero's journey. And thank you for coming on and sharing. It's a joy to see you. Well, I'm grateful for your 15 years of friendship and support and advice and sometimes riddling and instigating and encouragement. And it's been really life-giving to me.

And you've been such a huge part of our journey as well. So thanks for having me on. Thanks, Scott. If you would like to feel the joy of service, perhaps consider donating your birthday to Charity Water. Visit charitywater.org and follow the links. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenic.com, for classes, videos, and more.

Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbenius, David Jha, and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Rudershan.