>>Scott Harrison: My story starts with a family tragedy.
It happened when I was four years old.
Let's see if I can get the slides.
So I was -- I was a good healthy, happy kid.
My parents used a cereal bowl to cut my hair.
And my parents were awesome.
They loved each other.
They were healthy.
They were happy.
One day we move into a new house and unbeknownst to us, the gas company has installed a furnace
in this house that has cracks and it's leaking carbon monoxide.
Now, I was playing with my friends.
I was spending as little time in the house as possible.
My dad was working long hours at a new job.
And my mother is fixing up the house.
Fixing up the basement, specifically.
Breathing in these invisible toxic fumes.
So one day she walks across the bedroom and she collapses, unconscious, and we take her
to the hospital and after a long series of blood tests, they find these massive amounts
of carbon monoxide in her bloodstream.
And thankfully it hadn't killed her, but the carbon monoxide killed her immune system irreparably.
And I watched, as a kid, my mom go from this healthy, vibrant woman, to an invalid, allergic
to the world, using oxygen, forced to wear charcoal masks like this.
I grew up a pretty good kid.
I mean, I was helping to take care of mom.
Life suddenly changed.
I was an only child.
Family planning stopped.
And then at 18, like so many bad clichés, I rebel.
I start looking out for number one.
I grow my hair long.
I join a band.
I move to New York City to do all of the things I was not allowed to do growing up.
Now, our band immediately breaks up because we hate each other, but I learn that there
is a job in New York City where you can get paid to drink alcohol for a living.
It's called a nightclub promoter.
All you have to do is get the right beautiful people into nightclubs, and you could charge
them $500 for a bottle of champagne, $16 for a cocktail.
So the next 10 years of my life just flashed by.
I mean, there are entire years I don't remember.
This is a snapshot of me at 28, and this photo just shows the horrible condition of my soul.
I am holding out the Rolex watch so the photographer notices I own an expensive watch.
Looks kind of glamorous.
If you ran into me at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, it was a lot darker.
By this time, I had picked up every single vice you had heard of and then some maybe
you haven't even heard of.
28 years old, I'm a beach in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
I'm on the perfect vacation.
I should be happy.
I have a Rolex, I have a BMW, I have a beautiful girlfriend, I make great money.
And I realize, man, I'm the worst person I know.
I am the most selfish, sycophantic, morally bankrupt, spiritually bankrupt -- and to borrow
the theme of the conference -- I took some time to rethink and to reset.
So I asked myself, you know, what would the exact opposite of my life look like?
I'd spent all this time serving myself.
What would it actually look like to serve others?
Started volunteering to humanitarian organizations and to my surprise, I was denied by every
single one.
[ Laughter ] >>Scott Harrison: Because they're like, "We're
serious people.
You get people drunk for a living."
Thankfully one said yes and I wound up actually going to Liberia.
I volunteered to be a photographer, a photo journalist, and went to a country I'd never
even heard of right after the civil war ended.
Did a two-year tour with a bunch of humanitarians.
And as I started taking pictures in the city, I saw people living in this postwar environment.
No electricity, no running water, no sewage, no mail.
People living in houses without roofs, without windows.
But then when I got into the rural villages, I saw people drinking dirty water for the
first time, and that shocked me more than anything that I'd seen.
I couldn't imagine getting water from a swamp, from a pond, from a river.
And we saw this time and time again.
And fortunately for me, I saw that there was a solution.
There was one volunteer and he was working with the local communities to tap into the
clean groundwater 40 feet beneath the villages where people were dying from bad water.
He would take me back a couple months later when the project was finished and I could
drink clean water a stone's throw away from the swamp.
Two years, I'd seen a lot, but I came back to New York City and, you know, my heart was
completely broken.
I wish I had more time to tell you the amazing work I saw happening.
I was also broke.
So nightclub promoters do not understand the concept of saving money.
So I was living on a friend's couch, but what I'd seen over the couple years, there was
a deep responsibility to do something about it, and I knew that I was going to dedicate
the rest of my life to service.
And that started with -- with water.
Now, I can stand up here, give you a bunch of stats, I could tell you 800 million people
don't have water right now.
I could tell you 5,000 kids will die today drinking bad water.
I could tell you 40 billion hours are wasted in Africa just fetching water every single
year.
But over the last years I've traveled to over 15 countries, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of rural villages, and I've put faces and names to the water crisis.
Kids like John Bosco, 15 years old, and if you were with me, you'd watch him come out
and get water like this and take it home and give it to his -- his brothers and his sisters.
As you can imagine, water like this is -- is filled with disease.
Some diseases you might have heard of.
Some maybe you haven't heard of.
Maybe you're wondering what water like that would look like under a microscope, like I
did.
Looks like this.
It's alive.
Literally replicating with parasites and amoeba.
I learned there were solutions and we knew how to actually give every single person in
the world clean water.
There was no silver bullet, and if you tried to jam one solution down everyone's throat,
it would not work.
Sometimes you could build a bio-sand filter for almost 60 bucks and take dirty water like
this and turn it into water that you or I could drink, and in fact, I did.
Sometimes you could hand-dig a well for about $5,000.
You could drill wells.
You could protect the rain.
And water, when it was brought into communities, we saw it transform communities.
We say water changes everything.
It brings health into communities.
Kids stop dying of diarrhea.
From completely preventable diseases.
Kids actually get time back.
Women will tell us that they'll use the extra time to start small businesses earning an
extra 50 cents or a dollar a day, getting 3, 4, sometimes 5 hours back a day.
Some of the moms just tell us, "We're just better moms, we spend more time with our kids."
Tons of data about water making people healthier.
What I loved about it was it was just -- it was provable, it was measurable, and it was
inarguable, right?
There's no one in this room that thinks that child should be drinking the water on the
left.
No one.
We learn the water instead of -- also made people wealthier.
It made them healthier but it made them wealthier.
The U.N. published an 88-page paper saying every dollar invested in water and sanitation
returns 4 to $12 to the local economy.
But what was I going to do about it?
I was a club kid.
A broke club kid.
Well, to give you the founding moment of Charity: water 6 1/2 years ago, on a couch I just started.
And if you talked to me back then, I was going to tell you I was going to do two things before
I died.
I was going to see the water crisis ended.
I believe we should live in a world where everybody has something so basic, something
I'd taken for granted my whole life.
And I also would have told you that I wanted to reinvent giving, reinvent the people gave,
the way they thought about charity, because it was broken.
I'll talk about this for a second.
When I talked to my friends, I would hear time and time again, "Scott, I don't give
money to charity.
They're just black holes.
I don't know where my money goes.
I don't know how much actually gets to the people.
I can't see any results."
And I thought a new disruptive model could maybe solve for that.
I had three big ideas.
One was just to use a hundred percent of the public's donations at all times to directly
fund water projects.
Use every single penny.
Open up two bank accounts and said somehow we will find another group of people to pay
for the staff and the overhead.
We'd even pay back credit card fees.
$6 would reach the field.
$6,000.
$600,000.
Every single penny.
The second was use technology to show people where their money went.
And for us that was simple.
Handheld GPS devices were a hundred bucks, so for two AA batteries and a hundred dollars,
we could put every single water project up on Google Maps and Google Earth, so people
could see exactly where the money was going.
And we've done that from day one.
And the third thing was I wanted to build a brand.
Charities, at least in America, were so bad at this.
They had the worst Web sites.
They were so bad at telling the story.
And I thought, you know, if we were going to solve a problem this big, you know, we
would need to create an epic brand that rivaled the Googles, the Apples, the Nikes of the
world.
We just needed really good taste and a couple talented designers.
So it started with a party.
The only thing I knew how to do was go back into the nightclubs.
I got 700 people out.
I gave them all open bar, charged them $20 at the door, but this time I didn't keep the
money.
I took the money to a refugee camp in northern Uganda where 31,000 people lived and we built
three wells, we fixed three wells, and then we proved it.
We sent all 700 people the photos and the GPS so they could see exactly what their $20
had accomplished, and they were blown away.
They never expected to hear from the charity again.
And we said, "Let's just keep doing that on repeat until this problem is solved."
Over the last six years, we've raised just shy of $100 million now.
We've gotten over 400,000 people around the world involved, and most importantly, we've
been able to give 3 million people access to clean water in 20 countries around the
world.
Right now, over a thousand locals are working on Charity: water projects.
In my last few minutes, I'm going to talk about a couple things that worked.
It's been a growth story.
We averaged 63% growth over the first six years.
Let me tell you, charities do not typically grow like this.
In fact, in America, giving was net-negative over that time.
People were laying off parts of their workforce.
But this new way of thinking about giving, this new way seemed to work.
People were responding.
I'll talk about a couple of those things that have worked.
One, we gave our story away.
Instead of just asking people for money, we tried to inspire people and ask them to go
get their networks involved, their friends, their family.
One of the simplest ways was to ask people to give up their birthday.
We said "Don't throw a party.
Don't ask for gifts.
You don't need anything.
800 million people don't even have clean water.
Ask for your age in dollars or pounds or Euros."
Saw a 7-year-old kid go out and raise $22,000 asking for $7 from everyone he knew.
16-year-old girls raised $5,000.
89-year-olds giving up their birthday, writing really beautiful mission statements.
You know, Nona realized she lived twice as long as the average life expectancy in so
many of these countries where we were working.
Our birthdays so people could have more birthdays.
We use data to connect people because every single dollar was never touched.
It exists in a vacuum.
We tagged it and we showed people where it went.
So when Maggie's birthday was over, we created this product called Dollars to Projects.
And she could see exactly where every penny went.
She could see photos, GPS of the projects, learn how many people lived in these villages.
She could see her name on a sign or a plaque in the actual village.
She could cruise around on Google Maps and Google Earth, learn more about the area.
And every single donor, even if they gave a dollar, got a direct accounting for every
single dollar, every penny, and they got to see where that went.
Last year we needed more drilling rigs so we said what if we could crowdsource the world's
first drilling rig.
And we got a 10,000 people to give about $100.
We put the rig in action and we said how do we connect these people to this amazing drilling
rig that's going to drill for the next 15 years.
It's going to drill 80 wells and provide 40,000 people every year.
So we mounted a GPS unit on it, and we created a tracking page where people could see where
it is in real time.
We even gave it a Twitter account, so it tweets every time it drills.
It tweets its location.
We're interested in total transparency.
Probably what I'm most excited about is this new partnership with Google and we're starting
to use technology to tackle this age old problem of sustainability.
People have been talking about sustainability for years.
How do we know these projects are working over time?
And we said what if we could develop a simple water sensor and fit it across all the different
solutions and it could let us know in real time that water is actually flowing, how much
water is flowing.
We could even give that to a 16-year-old girl on a smartphone app and she could see what
her birthday contributed, how much water is flowing over time.
Well, this isn't something you can ask 16-year-old girls to fundraise for.
So we asked Google, and they said yes.
They awarded us a $5 million global impact award, and at the moment we're working with
seven different labs to develop sensors.
At the same time we're training local mechanics who can go and act on that data, who can go
and make repairs and keep the water flowing over time.
We have to have a thousand sensors installed by the end of December of this year.
As we look forward, we've go big goals.
3 million people is a lot if you try to fill up stadiums and make yourself feel good, but
we're after 800 million people.
So we put a stake in the ground at 100 million people.
We figured if we did that we would make the local paper back in New York.
We've given ourselves ten years to do this, and we think that as we put knowledge into
the communities, as new jobs are created, we're actually able to do much, much more.
So Eric Schmidt had challenged the room yesterday, he said, you know, help the 2 billion connected
connect to the other 5 billion.
I challenge you if you're interested in water, if you have ideas for us, have questions,
help us help the 5 million people and then keep going.
We have an amazing team, and we will continue to fight until every single person on this
planet has clean water to drink.
I'll leave you with my favorite quote.
It's from a Jewish rabbi who lived 2,000 years ago, and he challenged the people of his day.
He said if not us, then who?
And he said if not now, when?
Thank you guys.
I'll put my email up.
[ Applause ]