Episode 117 - The Prodigal Son of Charity Water with Scott Harrison
If you’ve never heard of Scott Harrison or Charity: Water, you’re going to be glad you tuned in today. His story starts when after a decade as a nightclub promoter, Scott declared spiritual, moral, and emotional bankruptcy.
As Scott shares, he tried every vice imaginable before he found himself looking for something more. In a search for meaning, he spent two years on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, taking photos and experiencing the effects of dirty water firsthand.
In 2006, he came back to New York City on a mission. Having seen the effects of dirty water, Scott turned his full attention to the global water crisis and the (then) 1.1 billion people living without access to clean water. What happened next is worth hearing for yourself...
Episode Transcript
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Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. We've got a really special edition today. You know, when I reflect back about one hundred podcast episodes we've had, they are all stories just like I was just talking about. And I can't think of somebody has a better story and who has acted on an opportunity than Scott Harrison. So in today's podcast, we're going to hear this story and hear the Charity Water Story. We're going. tohear Scott Harrison's personal story that leads into the charity Water Story. And Scott, thank you very much for being with us. It's a special privilege, lead us in. Tell us about the Scott Harrison story and bring us right through to the present, please.
Scott Harrison: That's a tall order. First of all, thanks for having me on. It's great to be able to chat and share with you all. You know, when I was four, there was this kinda defining tragedy that really marked my family. I was born into a middle class family. My dad was a business guy. My mom was a writer for the local paper. And we moved into an energy efficient house to get closer to his new job. And we moved in in the dead of winter and there was a carbon monoxide gas leak in that house. So we all start getting sick. I was four at the time on New Year's Day. My mom walks across the bedroom, crumples to the floor unconscious. That sets a whole series of blood tests and doctors trying to figure out why she was just passing out. And then they finally find these massive amounts of carbon dioxide in her bloodstream. That then leads to our family detecting the gas leak, ripping out the the heat exchanger. But for my mom, unfortunately, the damage was done. And she became an invalid from that point on and just never recovered. My dad and I had some health issues. We bounced back very quickly and we were really only sleeping in the house. And Mom was spending 24/7 unpacking boxes, even working in the basement where the leak was. So what happened to her was her immune system effectively just shut down and her body was unable to process any chemicals from that point on.
So stuff that, you know, would be just a part of our everyday lives, like soap or perfume or maybe car fumes or, you know, the wood stove from a fireplace. All this stuff would just totally crash her body, migraines. She would swell up her face, would swell three times the size. She would just have reactions to anything chemical. So that really led us to put her in these different isolation rooms in the house. And it was just a weird childhood, to be quite honest. I mean, I remember mom living in a tile bathroom for many years, covered entirely with aluminum foil, sleeping on an army cot that had been washed in baking soda 20 times, wearing these charcoal masks, not so dissimilar to the masks we're seeing now. And, you know, just isolated from everyone. So, you know, I think life changed for me. I was an only child. She had miscarried and had wanted to have a big family but the illness put a stop to that. And I went into a caregiver role at a young age. So I was needed to do the cooking and the cleaning and help her with her medicine and do a bunch of the stuff around the house. And, you know, I think growing up, my parents had this very deep and authentic Christian faith and decided not to sue the gas company for gross negligence. And it surprised so many their friends. I mean, here we had moved into a house. The gas company had installed a defective heater that almost killed us all. And they just said, look, we don't want to become bitter. You know, we believe that things happen for a reason and they just believed that, you know, God would heal her eventually. So I grew up active in the church and Sunday school. I would play, you know, in the worship band on Sundays and I would take care of mom. They put me in a Christian school. So the uniforms, the school met in the bottom of Assemblies of God Church, there were nine kids in my class. So, you know, I had, you know, I guess a very sheltered upbringing and I guess had some sparks of the entrepreneurial spirit back then. I was always trying to find ways to make a little bit of money so I would go borrow money to go buy a leaf blower and start leaf blowing other people's yards. I would sell Christmas cards door to door, mow lawns, but really just the good Christian kid that didn't smoke, didn't sleep around, didn't cuss and took care of Mom.
All that changed at 18. And, you know, I basically lived the classic prodigal son story. Woke up one day, said, I don't have to play by these rules, I'm going to move to New York City, which was only an hour and a half away. I'm going to join a rock band and I'm going to become rich and famous and I'm going to sleep with every beautiful girl that I can get my hands on. And I'm going to smoke and I'm going to try every drug. And I'm going to paint the town red and experience the opposite of rules, of the rules of religion. And I actually did join a band and we were playing some pretty famous venues at the time and were being courted by record labels. And then a month later, the band broke up because we all hated each other and just couldn't get along, couldn't turn up at practices. And that led me then to what eventually became a decade long career as a nightclub promoter. I said, look, if I'm going to rebel, I might as well do it in style. I couldn't believe that there was this job in New York City where you could get paid to drink. You would drink for free. All your friends would drink for free. And you could make hundreds of thousands of dollars filling up nightclubs with beautiful and famous people. And I just kind of had a knack for it. Hiring the right DJs, building mailing lists, you know, convincing MTV or VH1 or record labels to let us throw their industry parties and at the age of 19, jumped into the nightclub business two years before I was legally even allowed to be in the nightclubs. And that lasted for about 10 years. And over the next really nine years, I worked at 40 different nightclubs in New York City, threw parties around the world and Milan and Paris, and kind of chased the Fashion Week scene around the world. And from a lifestyle perspective, picked up every vice that you might imagine would go with the territory. So it started with smoking two packs of marlboro red a day, and then it led to heavy drinking and then, you know, started with marijuana and then cocaine and ecstasy and Klonopin and Special K and pretty much everything short of mainlining heroin. And then, you know, obviously a very promiscuous lifestyle, because that's why a lot of people get into the nightclub business to date models and to chase Fashion Week around the world. Lot of dark strip clubs, pornography, just, you know, real kind of degenerate debauchery, I guess would be a almost a generous way of putting it towards the end.
So there's just this trajectory over 10 years, walking farther and farther away from every shred of morality or spirituality that my parents had tried to instill in me through childhood and just descending deeper and deeper into this really dark, unhealthy hedonist lifestyle. And that kind of takes me to twenty eight years old. So then I have a moment where half my body goes inexplicably numb. And, you know, I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to die of some terrible brain tumor. You know, I've got some horrible disease. I mean, why would half of my body just lose feeling? So I start seeing the neurologist and getting the MRI and CT's and then get hooked up to EKGs and of course, they can't find anything wrong with me. I remember talking to my business partner at the time saying, you know, what do you think? He's like, dude, you're smoking two to three packs a day. You go to bed at noon and you know, you're basically a drug addict. No wonder you're having health issues.
Henry Kaestner: By the that changes way how does that happen when you're working with a doctor nurse and they go through all the different questions? Because I'll go to a health care checkup and they say, well, do you drink? And, you know, I probably have three drinks a week, but I'll say two. Right. Like everything. Do you sit down and say, actually here are all the different things I took like yesterday, or do you just kind of like fib the other way, too?
Scott Harrison: I think I hedged. I remember being, you know, wincing and then trying to be pretty honest, because, you know, you do want the doctor to solve your life threatening condition. But yes, you know. Oh, I'm an occasional cocaine user, probably, rather than, you know, I'm doing lines around noon.
Henry Kaestner: Okay. So they'll still see you?
Scott Harrison: They'll still see you. You know, they're getting paid. Right. So eventually, you know, the doctors can't find a thing wrong with me. And I think, you know, I talk about that moment because it was a real wakeup call for me where in some ways I was just faced with mortality. I mean, I'd been living like I was invincible, partying around the world, you know, dating girls on the cover of magazines, driving the BMW, flashing the Rolex watch, playing the grand piano in my New York City apartment with the perfect Labrador retriever. Just thinking that I had collected all of these markers of success. And then one day, you know, your health is gone or your health is potentially gone and maybe you only have a short time to live. So I think that led me to just ask some foundational questions about my faith. Did I still believe in heaven and hell? And if I did, I was pretty sure of where I was going. You know, I would not have fallen back on the once saved, always saved theology I think at that moment, after those 10 years.
And I think I just realized that I had been living such an unhealthy lifestyle, I wasn't in love with any of the girls that I dated. You know, go to dinner at 10, the club at 12 after hours at five, and then take Ambien to try to go to sleep at noon. And it was just so unhealthy. And I think I realized there that I needed to make a radical change that then took me to Punta del Este for a vacation over New Year's Eve a couple months later. And actually, the health issues just started to kind of go away as quickly as they came without any explanation and really without me changing my lifestyle too much. And I had this two week vacation in, you know, this really rich town at a compound in South America. And we'd flown private, there were magnums of Dom Perignon everywhere. We'd spent a thousand dollars on fireworks just to blow up in our backyard. It was just the hedonist paradise. And I remember just realizing that there would never be enough. That in some ways it was the pinnacle vacation. And I just realized I was unhappy. Most of the people around me were unhappy. There was so much brokenness and wreckage. And, you know, the guys that own the planes were 65 and they were dating girls younger than their daughters. And their daughters wouldn't even speak to them because it was just so much wreckage that lay in the wake of this lifestyle. And it was almost like a game of musical chairs where the music stopped. And for the first time, you know, I didn't have a place to sit. It was this really unsettling experience. So I remember my father over the years, you know, just kind of checking on my parents. I mean, they had been praying with everything they've got for a decade now that God's going to return the prodigal son home. And they've got churches praying. They have little old ladies locked up in prayer closets wearing holes in the carpet with their knees. I mean, they are doing everything they can to pray the prodigal home. So my dad is always giving me these Christian books. And he had sent me down to Punte del Este, to Uruguay with A.W. Tozer's Pursuit of God. And for some reason, I just tossed it in my bag. And I just remember having this bizarre experience of doing tons of drugs at night and then waking up with a hangover the next day reading A.W. Tozer like basically theology.
Henry Kaestner: I bet that's never been done before, though. I don't think that anybody has read Tozer quite that way.
I did. I'm not sure. You know, I later learned I think he wrote that book on a train ride over a period of 36 hours or something. So it's kind of the stream of consciousness and, you know, there was an intensity to it. So let me speed up. But, yeah, I think I'm realizing very quickly that I need to make a radical change. I have lost my way. And there's I think there something about that book. It was really the exact opposite intention of my life. Here was a man who was trying to get closer to God, trying to lead into generosity and childlike faith and righteousness and holiness like all the stuff that was just anathema to the way that I'd been living. And it brought me back to my childhood. It brought me back to some of the things that I really missed about the church or people of faith. And it was just kind of this reawakening in my heart, like I wanted to try to find my way back home. A couple months later in the summer, I remember trying to sleep with my girlfriend less and smoke less and do less drugs and just kind of failing mainly at all of that. And in the summer of that next year, I wound up firing a bartender at one of the venues for threatening a customer, harassing a customer. And the next night, the bartender came looking for me at the club I was working at with a gun and I had just left the club. So he missed me. And, you know, in nightlife, you get your life threatened all the time. I mean, I probably had at least 10, 15 people say that they were gonna kill me over the decade in nightlife for not letting them in a club or not giving them drink tickets or not letting in their girlfriend or whatever. But this was kind of the right threat at the right moment to say, I'm going to get out of town for a couple of weeks. This business really just really stinks. And maybe this is the change that I've needed. So I remember going out to Newark Airport, renting a cobalt blue Ford Mustang on a long lease and grabbing my Bible, grabbing a bottle of Doer's and now like a carton of marlboro reds and then just heading north. I had no idea where I was going, but I was just going to start driving towards Canada and think, reflect, pray, figure out what my life could be that was not the current or present state. So that led me through Connecticut and Vermont. And I remember listening to the Bible on audio. But at the same time, you know, I'm smoking like a fiend driving this car. And I wind up in a town called Greenville, Maine, on Moosehead Lake in Maine. And I remember asking this specific question, what would the opposite of my life look like? And there was this realization, just with some quiet time, to think that a pivot was not needed. This was not a small course correction that was going to effectively bring about any change. It needed to be a 180. I needed to find a way to walk in the opposite direction. And the answer to that question, what might the opposite of my selfish, hedonistic life look like would be go serve God and go serve the poor, you know, which now is something you would never even hear me say. But, you know, go serve people in need. And I thought, OK, what if I kind of tithed one year of the 10 years that I'd wasted and I tried to join a humanitarian organization as a volunteer unpaid for one year. So, you know, quickly putting that into action. I remember this little dial up Internet cafe on these old Dell computers in Greenville, Maine, applying to these positions at Doctors Without Borders and World Vision and Samaritan's Purse and Save the Children and Oxfam and UNICEF and the Peace Corps trying to find an opportunity and just realized, wow, maybe I don't ever need to go back to New York City. I now have a couple of weeks of distance between the old life, the nightlife and this new potential. I've just radically changed my life. What if I just never went back? So I didn't actually go back. I went from there to the south of France to a friend's house in the Pyrenees Mountains. Not a really glamorous place, but an extraordinarily beautiful kind of off the grid mountain cottage. And I waited then to see who was going to accept me. I mean, what were these opportunities that I was going to be able to pursue? And maybe as no surprise to anybody listening right now. Nobody would accept me. I was denied by World Vision and Samaritan's Purse and Save the Children and Oxfam and, you know, every reputable, credible humanitarian organization I had put an application with because, of course, my resumé and they don't even know what to do with it.
Rusty Rueff: Did you put club promoter on your resume?
Scott Harrison: Yeah, well events. I probably softened it with live events, you know, event planner. But I remember on one of them actually just being pretty honest, you know, like, do you smoke? Yeah, I'm trying to quit. Do you drink? Yeah, a little too much. So. You know, I just remember being so frustrated, I'm in the south of France in the middle of nowhere, and this little cabin in the Pyranesse, I'm getting denied by all these organizations. And I just remember praying to God. I'm like, look, I did my part. Like I stepped out in faith. I'm here, I'm ready to go. And now no one will take me. And the detail here. I just I remember it so clearly. This is 15 years ago but there was no cell phone reception in this house. And to get any cell phone signal, I would have to bike 20 minutes down to this little village and one afternoon, as I was biking through this little hotspot in the village. My phone actually rang. And it was one of the orgs that I had applied to that I later learned had actually rejected me on the first pass. And then they were about to start their mission and they didn't have this role that I'd applied to filled. So they went through the rejected applications and they called me in that moment that I was riding my bike through this town and had call it you a few minutes of cell phone reception. And I picked up the phone and they said, you know, we're a group called Mercy Ships were about to sail a 500 foot hospital ship into Liberia, West Africa. I'd never even heard of Liberia at the time, didn't know anything about the country or its history or much about Africa at all. And I'd applied to be a photojournalist, which is this one role on the ship, which had about 350 volunteer crew. And it was just a documentarian, the person who would take the pictures of all the important medical work that was happening and write stories that they'd be able to use for fundraising and awareness and stewarding their donors and the medical lab. So I was a pretty good photographer. I was a pretty good writer. I'd written for the student paper, know when I was a teenager and I had actually gotten a degree from New York University, although I was a C minus student and had barely gotten a degree in communications. So I was technically qualified, at least with a college degree, to do this job for free. And I remember the merchant ship saying, look, we're actually not offering you this position, but we've agreed to meet you. And the ship happened to be in Germany, Bremerhaven, Germany, kind of stocking up, you know, for the voyage down to Africa and doing some fundraising. I said, well, I'm in the south of France. I can be there tomorrow, or the next day. So I wound up taking the train up, meeting all the people, convincing them that I was serious. And this was a very Christian organization. So on paper, again, I just scared them and I said, look, I'm trying to change. I'm in this for the right reason. I promise I will not throw any parties on the ship. OK, I will not, you know, throw any of secret raves. Your staff is safe.
And they just decided to take a chance on me and they said we start I think it was two weeks. Can you report to the mission in two weeks? And I said, yeah, I can report in two days. So really, everything changed for me. I remember just realizing that I would have to kind of walk away from the vices and there was something symbolic or even, you know, maybe prophetic about stop, you know, quitting the smoking and drinking and the drugs and the sex and all that at the port and just walking up the gangway of a big white hospital ship and then sailing away to a new country and a new life. And that's kind of what happened a couple of weeks later. I remember smoking 60 or so cigarretes like three packs of Marlboro Reds, drinking seven or eight beers and just saying, that's it, I'm going to walk away from the drugs and the drinking and the like, all this stuff. And I'm going to open up a new chapter of life at 28 years old and see where this takes me.
The legend later is that I did turn up that next day to surrender my passport and report for duty. And I reeked of alcohol. Later, people were like, oh, my gosh. Yeah. We remember that first day when you turned up, you smelled like you'd been at a bar for a week, but that was it. You know, I never smoked again. I never touched coke or any of that stuff again. And, you know, I wound up being celibate for half a decade until I met my wife and never looked at pornography again. I mean, there was this clean break from the life of vice that had been almost a decade long. And then I sailed into West Africa and set foot on the continent for the first time.
So long story short, I'd signed up for a year in West Africa. I'm with these amazing Christian doctors. We're all paying about five hundred dollars a month for the pleasure of volunteering. So not only are we not getting paid for the work, we're paying the organization. That was one of the ways that they just raised money. They turned us into an army of fundraisers. And my job as the photojournalist was to document all of the terribly sick people that we were going to make whole or make well, just to kind of, you know, 30,000 foot view of the experience. Liberia at that time had just finished a 14 year civil war. It was a war led by a malevolent warlord, a guy named Charles Taylor, who put guns in the hand of children. And for 14 years ravaged this country, causing children to kill their parents, kill their brothers and sisters, kill their grandparents, just some of the most evil trauma inflicted on a country for a decade and a half. He had fled the country to Nigeria, and our hospital ship was kind of coming in the aftermath with a bunch of other aid groups to try to pick up some of these pieces. At the time, there was no electricity in the country. There was no running water in the country. There was no sewage system in the country. And you couldn't send a letter. There was no mail system in this country of four million people, notably with defective artwork. There was one doctor for every fifty thousand people. So if you got sick, you were just completely out of luck. There was no health care system here. This is, I think, especially even relevant today as we're all aware of the limitations of our health care systems when it comes to equipment like ventilators. There were two surgeons in Liberia, but no place to even operate. So here we come with these doctors and this giant ship with 42 beds, a state of the art hospital, three operating theaters. We had the only C.T. scan in four neighboring countries at the time. So you can imagine the sick people that would meet our doctors. So we would do these patient screenings in advance of the ship coming into the port. We would send people out to flier and they would post banners on lampposts, and at health clinics that often weren't even working at schools. And that's if you've got one of these conditions, a cleft lip or a cleft palate if you have a giant facial tumor. If you were burned during the war, often the rebels would pour hot oil on the bodies of children to try to fuse body parts together just for fun. They'd say, you know, if you have one of these conditions turn up on this day and our doctors will try to screen you and we'll see if we can help. And I knew that we had 1500 available surgery slots to fill and that my third day in Africa. I remember getting up at 5:00 in the morning, grabbing my two Nikon cameras, putting on hospital scrubs and traveling through the city to the football stadium, the soccer stadium where we would be greeting the patients and then triaging them. And I knew we had fifteen hundred available surgery slots to fill. And as we turned the corner, we saw more than 5000 people standing in the parking lot of the stadium waiting for us to open the doors. And that was a really formative moment for me. I remember just weeping, realizing we were going to send over 3000 people home with no treatment and no hope. I later learned it was even worse. Many of those people had walked from neighboring countries with their children. They had heard from Guinea or from Cote d'Ivoire or Sierra Leone that there was the ship of doctors that might be able to help them. And they were just too far back in line. We couldn't serve the needy. I tried to focus on the hope and the people that we were able to help. And over the next year, I documented very close and personal those fifteen hundred people that we were able to treat. And I saw cataracts removed. I saw people see for the first time in their life. I saw 62 year old women who never had access to a three hundred dollar cleft lip surgery. So a 62 year old woman who her entire life had been unable to eat or speak properly. So the food and the water would just spill out of her mouth. And thanks to a three hundred dollar surgery that took less than an hour, she was able to get her face and her dignity and her life back. So it was an amazing kind of first year of just taking 50000 photos, writing every day, working 80 hour weeks. And the cool thing was I actually had a big guest list. Fifteen thousand people on my club list. So I just repurposed that list. And they were getting pictures of leprosy. They were getting pictures, you know, of tumors and clefs and some of these burn contracture surgeries. And, you know, I remember, of course, a bunch people unsubscribed just saying, you know, we signed up for your fashion parties, not the leprosy party or the tumor party. But most people were just so interested. You know, here was like the dude that they had done drugs with or sprayed champagne from the DJ booth is now running around the country they'd never heard of and West Africa with a bunch of humanitarian doctors who were saving people's lives. And they begin to give money. And they many people even began to. Fly to volunteer, sing, I want to come on that ship and do the same thing you're doing. I want to try to find work with purpose. So that year I discovered that I think my environment changed so dramatically. So I was able to quit the smoking and the drinking and the drugs and all that stuff because my community had changed. I mean, it's not cool to smoke around doctors and surgeons, right? Here was a group of people that were trying to use their resources for the sole purpose of ending the needless suffering that they were seeing. And it was contagious. So I didn't know what to do. I just signed up for a second year and I went back to Liberia for a year to around two. And it was really that second year that I discovered water or the lack of access to clean water was what was causing so many of the diseases that we were seeing. And I learned that half of the country. So over two million people were drinking from disgusting swamps or ponds or brown, dirty rivers. And I learned half of the disease in the country was because of people drinking unsafe water and not having access to sanitation or hygiene. So processing what I was seeing in the rural most remote areas of the country with some of the doctors and medical staff, they just really started encouraging me. Like, yeah, we know water is the greatest health need in the entire world. If you want to go work on that, you can eliminate the need for a ship like ours to even be in this country. You can eliminate some of the 5000 sick people that were standing in that parking lot. Many of them, if they just had clean water and sanitation in their communities, they wouldn't have had the things that brought them to us. So all that to say, you know, working with these doctors changed my life in the most profound way. I think I learned that the same skill for storytelling that could fill nightclubs full of beautiful people or get the right DJs to fly in from Paris could also be used to highlight important redemptive humanitarian work that could also lead to a response. The response in this case, getting some of my club friends to give money or to volunteer and then kind of third, over that second year, I had the issue that I was going to become deeply passionate about, which to me felt like attacking the root cause of so many of the symptoms we were seeing, you know, the reason why so many people in the country or half the people in the country were sick. So, you know, who is the advocate for clean water? Who is going to be the person that was going to go out and fight for that? And I thought maybe that could be me.
Henry Kaestner: And it has been. Bring us up to speed now. Charity Water has been around for more than a decade. How long has it been around and how big is it now? Who are you serving? What countries?
Scott Harrison: So we're 13 years old. So I've been at this for 15 years now. So two years with Mercy Ships as a volunteer and then came back and started the org 13 years ago. We've grown a lot. We did almost one hundred million dollars last year in donations. We have raised about half a billion now from a global community of donors, both big and small. And our work is now in twenty eight nations around the world where we've helped about 11 million people get access to clean water. That's eleven million people out of seven hundred eighty five million people. So we've really only solved about one seventy-seventh of the global problems that exist today. But, you know, eleven million people is more than live in New York City, in the boroughs. You know, it's a of people know, five or six hundred Madison Square Gardens full of people. It's a lot as well. So we have a pretty unique business models. So from day one, we realized that so many donors don't trust charities.
And there's this kind of disenchantment among so many people when it comes to giving. So we have this unique business model where 100 percent of all donations from the public, one hundred percent of all donations go directly to fund clean drinking water projects that we then prove on Google Earth and Google Maps with satellite images. And in some countries, even Real-Time sensors showing how much water is flowing. For 13 years, then myself and a very small team, we raise all of our overhead, the office, the staff costs the Epson Toner in these days, the Zoom fees. We raise all that separately from one hundred and thirty five families. So well over a million donors from 140 countries are able to give in the most pure way, where if they give a dollar or ten dollars or a million dollars, that all goes directly into the construction of water projects that help people get clean water. And then these hundred thirty five families cover all the aspects that cover all the overhead. It's been incredibly difficult to kind of balance those two constituents over time, but I think it's led to so much of the growth and just the unique value proposition of the organization.
Rusty Rueff: So, Scott, you're an entrepreneur and you're running a startup. Now it's beyond being a startup now, although lots of times people will say a nonprofit is always a startup. Right, because you start all over all the time. But give us the early days of that startup. You were able to convince some pretty important people to support you in those early days. Just take us through what the ups and downs and the bumps and grinds were of the start of early startup days.
Yeah. You know, day one. So the first was kind of coming up with a business model. OK, what's going to make us different? And again, I, I mentioned this distrust. I couldn't believe the numbers. 42 percent of Americans polled by USA Today said they don't trust charities. More recently, 70 percent of Americans polled by NYU said they believe charities waste their money. So I really had this clear vision of well if we could tell people that 100 percent of the money would go and then pillar number two, we could prove it. We might be able to win some trust. Let me take some of these disenchanted people and say, hey, let's take another look. So those are kind of the first two big ideas. Give away 100 percent, use technology to prove where people's money went.
And then the third was just this belief that for our work to be contextually relevant and sustainable, it must be led by the locals in every country where we work. So we shouldn't send guys that look like me from New York City to Ethiopia and go drill wells. Our job would be to find the local Ethiopian partners and build their capacity, raise the awareness and the money. But it would be the locals in each of these nations that would be operating the drilling rigs, that would be constructing the water projects, that would be going in and doing the health and the hygiene and the sanitation training. So we put those three things together. And then I just threw a party at a nightclub for day one because I had no better idea at the time. And I got some friends to donate a club in the Meatpacking District. It was during Fashion Week and they donated Open Bar and I just invited people to come in. And I charged them all 20 dollars at the door. So that first night we raised fifteen thousand dollars and one hundred percent of the money went straight to a refugee camp in northern Uganda where we did our first few projects. And then we sent a video team out and we documented the clean water flowing at this refugee camp. And we sent the photos and the G.P.S. coordinates and the video back to the 700 people and said, you did this by coming to an event, by putting twenty dollars in a big plexi box. People have clean water because of you. And it was this idea of closing the loop. This idea of proof. And I remember the response was just overwhelming. People said, I never expected to hear from you again. I never expected anything good to happen with my money. How could we do more? How can we engage our friends? What's the next event? So we kind of had this proof of concept and just such early positive feedback to the motto. So let's just keep doing this as many times as possible, creating awareness, raising money, promising that a hundred percent of that would go, and then showing the donors exactly the impact of that. So it's really been an exercise of, you know, events and gallery shows, virtual reality, gosh, I mean, over a decade plus, you know, we've made I think we've made two thousand different videos from animated videos to videos for kids. You know, it's really just kind of a practice of storytelling, both the need and then the results.
Rusty Rueff: What I love about your story to Scott is that you didn't abandon the skills that you had in your prior life. Right. You brought those to bear for charity water. And, you know, we continue to see the results of that. I want to shift for just a second here because as we've mentioned a couple times and that, you know, we're in this COVID19 time know, we're actually two weeks from Easter. So we're coming up on Palm Sunday as we're recording this. This is a crazy time for nonprofits. Right. And everyone's trying to figure out what can they do to maneuver through this? Words of wisdom from charity water, things you're trying, things that you could share with our listeners?
Scott Harrison: Yeah. Gosh, I am deeply optimistic as a person and about most things, and I am not optimistic about the short or medium term outlook for nonprofits. So charity water is coming off of three consecutive years at scale of thirty five percent revenue growth. So we've gone from a 40 million dollar organization to 100 million dollar organization just in a couple of years. And we're seeing giving drop by 50 percent. We're seeing some revenue streams down 80 percent. You know, I have had the opportunity to counsel a bunch of other nonprofit leaders, and what I am most afraid of is that the optimism that is so required for them to typically do their jobs is going to have a lot of them running out of cash. I don't see them slashing their operating budgets fast enough. And that's really what I'm saying, is you've got to make the cash that you have stretched for some order of magnitude longer than you think right now. And I think, you know, without massive assistance from donors or foundations or the government, you're going to see tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of nonprofits just go away, just not be able to weather this storm. You know, it affects both of our major donors, a cut of the million plus level, and it affects people who are giving 10 dollars a month, who are part of the 10 million people now unemployed. And I'm hearing from them every single day. I'm getting letters like, I can't believe I had to cut my ten dollar month commitment to charity water, but I've lost my job and my wife has lost her job. And, you know, we're not sure how to put food on the table, let alone pay our rent. So I think, you know, my advice is probably much more sobering message to a lot of the nonprofits out there. This could be far worse than you're planning. I don't think we just bounce back in Q4 and, you know, everything is just fine and donors are stepping up or, you know, surprising with their generosity. I think this is a much longer cycle than many optimists in the sector are prepared for. To that end, I mean, we cut our op ex budget by 24 percent last week, myself and all the execs. We took 20 percent salary cuts. I mean, we're making pretty quick moves that I'm not seeing really to a lot of the other nonprofits that relationship with us.
Sorry, that's not a very optimistic way to think. Here's the real sense of loss, like clean water right now. Our actual mission is more important than it ever has been in the last two years since I've been doing it. Clean water is literally the first line of defense against the virus. If you don't have water to wash your hands, right, go to CDC website. The number one thing we are all supposed to do is wash our hands, but 10 percent of the world, doesn't have the ability to wash their hands. They literally couldn't. They're unequipped. So, you know, we have over the last 13 years, we've now made 11 million people safer. We've equipped 11 million out of those seven point eighty five million people with the clean water to protect them selves, their families, their loved ones. But the mission of clean water is more important now than ever before. And we're going to be getting less of it because of the economic impact of this.
There is a real sense of loss. And, you know, just make sure that we do the best with what we have. And, you know, we are seeing some donors step up and increase their commitments as they're able. But I think it'll be a tough cycle.
Henry Kaestner: Scott, I want to ask one question before William brings us to a close. You are in a unique spot to be able to work with a lot of entrepreneurs globally. You work with local distribution, you work with local implementation. The people are there doing the drilling rigs and with people that are doing the sanitation and coming back in in partnership. And so you're in this unique spot to understand what entrepreneurship looks like in many cases, Faith Driven Entrepreneurship. What are some observations you've seen and made over the last 13 years about entrepreneurs in places like Africa and Southeast Asia that's encouraged you, challenged you? Maybe something that might be an inspiration or encouragement for our audience, which is mostly Western entrepreneurs. But what have you learned?
Scott Harrison: Yeah, I think one of the things that strikes me is just the extraordinary work ethic of many of our local partners, the leaders of those organizations just, you know, they bleed the cause. And there, you know, again, in our sector, it's very different because nobody's in it for the money. You know there's no exit, there's no IPO, there's no acquisition moment for charity water for any of our partners out there. And, you know, I'll give an example. We have about eight drilling teams in northern Ethiopia. It's about a 10 million dollar a year water program there. And our drillers, they go out there. Twenty nine out of 30 days of work. They take one day off every month during the eight month dry season because they want to maximize the amount of people that they're able to give clean water to. They know for four months when it rains, things just shut down. They can't operate the rigs. The roads turn to mud. So imagine taking one day off and they just so deeply believe in the mission and the work. So I think there's a sense of commitment to one cause that maybe I don't always see here. You know, I see a lot of people are like, oh, if I don't do this, I could do the next thing or I can do the next thing or I think that's also just unique to our sector. You know, if you're deeply passionate about hunger, like you are just going to go and go and go and the minute, any person on the planet is left hungry at night. There's no stopping. So there's a singularity of focus, I think. And then a commitment to just, you know, really, really work hard.
William Norvell: Thanks for sharing that, Scott, and thanks for sharing your truth about what's happening in the nonprofit sector, too. I mean, that is something people need to hear. And I know I may not be the most optimistic, but I really appreciate you sharing how you're looking at things, because that may be exactly what a lot of people need to hear. To take a real hard assessment of what the impact can be on their organization. So appreciate your time and your story. And as we do come to a close, one of the things we love to let our listeners into is just where God has our guest right now. And it's amazing to see God's word transcend our guest and our listeners.
And so if you wouldn't mind sharing with us where God might have you in a scripture, it could be the season, could be today even could be something that's just coming alive to you in a new way. Where's he taking you in his word during this time?
Scott Harrison: Yeah, I think it's the practice of gratitude, which is actually not super intuitive for me. I'm an enneagram eight, you know, I'm always looking for a fight and nothing is ever good enough. It's funny, during the book tour, people would say, like charity water, you've raised like half a billion dollars and you've grown faster than anyone. Did you ever think that you guys would be so successful? I'm like, this is such a small fraction of what I believe we should have and would have achieved by now. Like, I'm totally dissatisfied with 11 million people. Like it's frickin clean water. You know, I've got friends that built and sold video games for twice as much money as I've raised to save human life in half the time, you know, so I think there's just this sense of, like, discontent that is just I mean, it's just kind of who I am and it's just how I look at things. So I've been trying in this season to just really be grateful. I mean, I've got my family, I've got my kids. You know, we wake up every morning and we try to just play the gratitude game and, you know, list out 30 or 50 things that we're grateful for, our health, our family, you know, the ability just to be a couple hours outside of New York City with our loved ones in their 80s and know that we can probably protect them a little bit better, and the organization. The other day we were walking through the woods and I was thanking God for the thorns. And my kids are like, why thorns? And I'm like, well, I have a machete in my hand. And it's fun to cut them down as we're like cutting a path through the backyard. So I think I'm just trying to just be so grateful in the midst of really bad news, both for our organization and our impact and giving. Obviously, I've got many friends in New York City who are sick with COVID 19 and are really struggling and have double pneumonia. I mean, I think everybody listening can attest it has been a very, very long and bad news cycle. And I'll tell you, you know, if you sit around with a spouse or your kids or you just go out on your own, the minute you finish naming 50 things you're grateful for, it really just changes you. I mean, you can last on that for a while before you go back into the grumbling or irritability that many of us are experiencing cooked up with our kids, ready to do homeschool.
Rusty Rueff: Hey, Scott, we know one of your principles is radical transparency. So thanks for being radically transparent with us today. That was special.
Henry Kaestner: Very good being with you, Scott. Thank you.
Scott Harrison: Thanks for having me.