Transcript of the interview with Scott Harrison, Founder and CEO of charity: water for The Failure Factor Podcast.

Megan Bruneau:
Scott, thank you so much for being here today.

Scott Harrison:
Yes, absolutely.

Megan Bruneau:
So first of all, tell us a bit about charity: water. What was the problem you’re trying to solve here?

Scott Harrison:
Alright, thanks for having me. This will be fun. You know, I wasn’t very creative in the naming. So it’s a charity that helps people get water. Yeah, our mission is to bring clean and safe drinking water to everybody in the world. And as we record this today, there are 703 million people on the planet today who are drinking dirty, toxic, contaminated water. So it’s about one in 10 people alive. And we think that number should be zero.

We work currently across 29 countries throughout Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. We focus primarily on rural communities. So about 80% of the people on Earth without water live in rural areas and 20% are urban. And we fund a whole different range of solutions—water solutions—anything from a $65 household filter to a $2 million sprawling gravity-fed system that’s powered by solar that would connect 20 or 30 villages to water, and everything in between. So the great thing about the problem is that you can always solve the problem. Before we started, we were talking about pancreatic cancer and strokes and Alzheimer’s and all of these thorny challenges that we face that we may find a cure after billions and billions of dollars of research.

We have the cure for water, and we’ve had it for a long time, but we haven’t implemented it. So that’s what charity: water tries to do. We work with individuals primarily—certainly some corporations and foundations—but it’s really about building a global movement of everyday people who raise their hand and say, “I want to live in a world where everybody has water.”

Megan Bruneau:
Yes. This is something that I can relate to… or I can’t relate to because I’ve always had drinking water coming out of my tap, but I can imagine how difficult life would be if I didn’t have clean water.

Scott Harrison:
Yeah, and we can talk about that later because that is one of the biggest challenges. You know, the things that we talked about before we started rolling… We’ve been affected by cancer, right? Everybody—every single person listening—has a friend or a neighbor or a co-worker that’s been affected by cancer. How many people listening have ever had to walk seven hours to give dirty water to their children and then watch a child die of dysentery or go blind with trachoma?

Megan Bruneau:
Totally. It’s almost unbelievable. It’s almost like imagining that… It feels like it’s some sort of fable or story of the parent who’s like, “I used to walk 10 miles both uphill to get to school.” And then dad—

Scott Harrison:
Right. You hear that, you’re like, “No way. There’s no way people today are still walking every day.”

Megan Bruneau:
How long far did you say to get water?

Scott Harrison:
Today, women just in Africa will waste 204 million hours. Just today. So, you know, sometimes these walks are six, seven hours round trip. Three hours out with the empty jug and then four hours back because you’re hauling 40 pounds of water. And the water’s not even safe. That’s kind of the tragedy, you know? If you were walking for helpful, useful water for your family… But they’re often walking to a poisonous source, which is just—

Megan Bruneau:
All day. And why is it that women are the ones doing it?

Scott Harrison:
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I’ve been to 72 countries now. I’ve been to Africa over 55 times. In every culture I have ever experienced in the world, it is always the women and the girls. It’s where the burden falls. It’s not unique to Africa or India or Asia or Central and South America. It’s just the role of women to go get the water. And the role in many of these cultures of men—at best—is to earn an income, to work in the fields, to work with livestock, to work in a factory and provide income. But this really terrible burden falls to the mothers and the girls.

Well, we’re into the issue already—in many of these countries, it’s the top reason why girls will drop out of school. First of all, their school doesn’t have water or toilets. So you can imagine: you hit puberty and you’re staying home a few days—four or five days a month—and then it becomes their role to go get the water for the family. Instead of becoming educated, leading their communities and their countries forward, they’re just senselessly walking for unhelpful water.

Megan Bruneau:
That issue that you just mentioned about not having toilets either—is that something charity: water also addresses?

Scott Harrison:
In schools, yeah. We found early on that if we just built water, that wasn’t solving the problem of girls in school. And not only do you have to do toilets, you have to do separate toilets for the boys and separate for the girls. And the toilets are actually about twice as expensive as the water solution. So in schools, it’s a kind of 25 or $30,000 package. And this is kind of a sector word—it’s called WASH: Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene. You put those three things together—clean water, sanitation, then washing your hands with the clean water—you can eliminate 70% of disease in so many of these communities.

Megan Bruneau:
And is this largely across Africa, or are there other places?

Scott Harrison:
Yeah, but half of the problems in Africa, and then the rest is India, Southeast Asia—countries like Cambodia or Laos or Vietnam—some countries in Central and South America as well.

Megan Bruneau:
Okay, well, we’re gonna obviously get more into this, but now I’m curious: What drew you to this problem? Like, what made this feel personal to you or meaningful to you?

Scott Harrison:
Yeah, well… I started at the beginning. I was raised in a very conservative Christian home. I was an only child. My mom became an invalid when I was four. There was a freak carbon monoxide gas leak in our house. And we all almost died, but she was the one to… She passed out on New Year’s Day, 1980, collapsed to the floor. She was the canary in the coal mine. And we found massive amounts of carbon monoxide in her bloodstream. My dad wound up ripping out the heater that was improperly installed. And my dad and I bounced back with our health, and she just never did. So she kind of was like living in a bubble. Anything chemical, anything toxic would make her really, really ill.

So she lived in isolation in special rooms covered in tin foil. She would sleep on cots, wash 20 times in baking soda. You know, there were signs all on the outside of our house: “Keep out, keep out—chemically sensitive patient.” So it was a weird childhood, but I was in a caregiver role. So I learned how to take care of mom and do the cooking and the cleaning and help my dad run the house. And I thought I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. I was gonna be a good Christian doctor, and I was gonna cure my mom and all the other sick people I’d met.

And then 18 happened, and I realized that I was only about an hour and a half away from New York City and you could live a very different life there. And I just really had kind of the classic cliche rebellion moment—like, “Now it’s my turn. Childhood sucked. I didn’t have any fun. Let me go have fun. Let me go be a child for me. Let me go play in New York City. And also let me break the rules. Like, I wanna smoke, I wanna have sex, I wanna drink, I wanna try drugs. All these things that I wasn’t allowed to do, I want to experience.”

I found my way into club promoting and learned you could rebel in style if you filled up nightclubs full of beautiful, famous, rich people. You could be rewarded for rebelling. And if you can get the right people inside the clubs, you could charge them $25 for a cocktail that cost 25 cents to make. Or $1,000 for a bottle of champagne that was $40 to buy. So I wound up really spending the next 10 years kind of pursuing that hedonistic, decadent lifestyle—chasing fashion week around the world to Milan and Paris, chasing the vacations to Punta del Este in Uruguay or Brazil, and chasing the cars and the watches and all these markers of success that I thought would bring happiness.

And 10 years later—after 40 nightclubs, working across 40 different clubs—I just had this really powerful, cathartic moment where I realized, “Wow, I’m really unhappy.” I looked around and people who had way more than me also seemed pretty unhappy. And it was just this really clear realization that there would never be enough. This insatiable desire for consumption, for more—there needed to be more girls, more drugs, more parties. You would never reach the top. And I kind of wanted to get off the ride. I also realized how far I had come—slowly, but then suddenly—from the foundation of spirituality, the foundation of morality. This little boy who wanted to be a doctor was spraying champagne from the DJ booth and doing cocaine until noon, taking Ambien to come down so that I could wake up at 8 p.m. and do it all over again. And I just hated who I’d become.

Megan Bruneau:
I mean, thank you for sharing all of that, Scott. And I’m curious—there are so many questions about that entire journey. First of all, as a little boy—you said how old were you when? You were four? And did your mom ever recover, or did she live the rest of her life—

Scott Harrison:
She didn’t. She just kind of learned how to deal with it. She wore a mask for 40-some years.

Megan Bruneau:
Traumatizing for you to go through COVID and see the masks. How did that affect you? Like you mentioned, you were in this sort of parentified role, right? You were taking care of her alongside your dad. How do you think that affected you and your development—to be in that role and to perhaps not have the type of attunement and connection with a parent that one might have with a parent who’s well and who’s showing their whole face?

Scott Harrison:
You know, it’s an interesting question. In my childhood, I thought it was just normal in a way because that’s all you know. I never had brothers and sisters. I had a sick mom, and we all just did the best that we could. My dad was this really amazing, faithful guy who stuck by her side and really was a caregiver and kind of stepped off the business executive path so that he wouldn’t travel and he could stay home.

I wound up writing a book about the whole story, and I was working with a co-writer. I remember she just felt so sorry for me. She sat me down once and said, “I’m crying doing these interviews and hearing about your childhood.” And that felt so foreign to me—for someone to take it all in and have compassion. I’m like, “No, no, this taught me who I am today and it gave me independence.” I always put such a positive spin on the entire experience. But she said, “But you never saw your mom’s face. You weren’t able to hug your mother. You couldn’t touch her.” So I think there’s probably… I don’t know what I really did with that. It was nice to have somebody feel compassion for me.

Megan Bruneau:
But for you growing up, that was what reality is—what it is—normal.

Scott Harrison:
Absolutely.

Megan Bruneau:
So then when you hit 18 and you decide to move to New York City—and like you said, there’s this part of you that was rebelling or wanted to play, perhaps not have the responsibility that you did before. Because it doesn’t sound like you had fun without the structure, without all the rules and…

Scott Harrison:
Yeah, fun. Just fun. Without the structure, right? Without all the rules.

Megan Bruneau:
Because you probably had to be so constrained growing up. Like you couldn’t just have friends over, right? Or come in from wherever you were and go hug your mom and get everything dirty.

Scott Harrison:
I remember a detail: If I was out—even if I went to church and somebody would hug me with perfume after church on Sundays—I would have to strip naked in the garage and put on clothes that were “pure” before I could even come in the house. So there was this ritual: You would go out into the world, you would get contaminated, you would come back, and then there would be these clothes that had been washed in baking soda and special non-scented soaps. Then enter the house.

Megan Bruneau:
Yeah, so no wonder. You perhaps associated all of that and the morality with just stress and responsibility. And there was a party that’s like, “I’m going to go the complete opposite direction and do all—not only am I gonna smell like smoke, I’m gonna smoke 40 Marlboro Reds a day.”

Scott Harrison:
Exactly.

Megan Bruneau:
So then you played your way through that journey for the next 10 years, you said. And you said you had this point where you just looked around and you were like, “I’m not happy.” And actually even the people who have more than me—more money, more women, more houses or cars—they’re not happy either. Do you recall if there was a specific moment or a specific—

Scott Harrison:
I was in South America, in Punta del Este. And I remember the time… My girlfriend was on the cover of a fashion magazine, and I had a BMW and a nice loft in New York. And I think we’d flown private on somebody else’s plane, and we’d rented this compound. And there were these lovely people at the compound that would follow us and pick up our towels and fold them behind us. And there was a yacht that we rented, and we’re swimming with—just peak, peak, peak, peak. And you just kind of get there. You’re like, “Is this it? I should be enjoying this a lot more.” But everybody’s drinking heavily and doing drugs, so it also feels unhealthy. Here we were on this beach—almost idyllic, tranquil environment—and we’re blasting house music and snorting cocaine, almost ruining it.

So yeah, that was really a moment for me. Like I’d been playing the game of musical chairs, and the music stopped and I didn’t have anywhere to sit down. It was a disruptive moment. I started to re-explore faith as an adult. I remember not liking the trappings of religion but thinking Jesus was a badass. He actually railed against the religious establishment of the day. He lived a moral life of compassion. He looked out for people in need. I had done nothing for people in need.

You know, my parents were very religious. They would send me religious books. I would never read them. And somehow on this vacation, I start reading one. And I remember coming across a verse in the Bible that says, “True religion is to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep from being polluted by the world.” I remember thinking, “I’m all for two.” I mean, I’ve done nothing for charity—nothing to serve or volunteer anyone but myself. And not only am I polluted, I actually pollute others. I’m like a double polluter. The more people get wasted at our clubs, the more people might cheat on their partner with a cute boy or a cute girl, the more money they spend.

Megan Bruneau:
Well, it also sounds like that verse really reminded you—okay, this is maybe not necessarily about becoming indoctrinated or following some rigid structure, but actually it’s about compassion and service. And those are things you connected with, but realized, “Actually I’m feeling really hollow, probably because I’m not doing these things or there’s no element of that in my life.”

Scott Harrison:
So I come back from that to New York, and it takes a couple months, but I ask this very pointed question: “What would the opposite of my life look like?” And I think there was a realization that a pivot was not in order—this was a radical 180-degree course correction. And the answer I came up with was: Sell everything you own and go serve people in need for one year. There was this biblical principle of tithing that I’d been brought up with—where you give 10% of your money to the church or to the poor. I thought, “What if I gave 10% of my time?” Could I be useful? Did I have any skills that could come out of a nightclub and be useful to others?

So I applied to some of the famous humanitarian aid organizations that I had tangentially heard of—Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, World Vision, and the Red Cross. As it turns out, they are not looking for nightclub promoters to join their serious humanitarian mission. So I’m denied by the first 10 organizations. Doctors Without Borders is looking for doctors, it turns out. But I really pursued this desire to serve, and I finally found this opportunity—which eventually leads to water—in post-war Liberia as a photojournalist on a huge hospital ship.

And I was not technically a photojournalist, but I had limped through NYU to get a communications degree because I thought that would be the easiest degree. I was a decent writer and a decent hobby photographer. I put this degree plus some pictures on a blog and some stuff that I’d written for a local newspaper together and convinced this organization to let me come on their mission for a year. And the other fun catch was I would have to pay them $500 a month. So this was kind of income going the other way—this was how everybody paid crew fees for room and board to help share costs for the mission.

So my life changed so radically setting foot in West Africa for the first time—in a country that had just come out of a 14-year brutal civil war led by Charles Taylor and child soldiers. The country had no electricity, no running water, no sewage system, no mail. It was just broken. And there was one doctor for every 50,000 people living there. I think here in America, we have a doctor for every 300 of us. So if you got sick, you were completely out of luck—you died. And this hospital ship would sail up and down the coast of Africa with a very simple idea: Let’s bring the best doctors and surgeons and medical professionals on their vacation time to offer free services.

And I was gonna document everything that happened on and off the ship. And I loved it. I mean, I remember having this all-in moment. I’m like, “I have to quit smoking. I have to quit drugs. I can’t gamble. I should quit drinking. I wanna live clean.” And there was something symbolic of walking up the gangway of this hospital ship full of doctors and sailing away to a new life, to a new continent. So I remember going out with a bang: I got fantastically drunk the night before and smoked two or three packs of Reds. And then that was it—walked up the gangway, surrendered my passport, and started a very different life chapter.

Megan Bruneau:
How did the people around you react when this happened? Like, I’m just imagining your community—

Scott Harrison:
No one ever asked that question, but I later learned that I reeked of alcohol when I checked in to this Christian humanitarian doctor organization. Like, “Boy, this guy smells like he’s been out drinking all night… and cigarettes.” Because I had Nicorette pouches—I had gone to the drugstore, I had those blister packs. I had the patch on, and I was chewing the gum. So they remember me as kind of this loose cannon—this kid from New York who’s wearing all black and smells like smoke and alcohol. This was 2004—20 years ago.

Megan Bruneau:
What year was this? 2004, okay. Yeah, my gosh. And then, I mean, I’m curious of course how those people reacted, but I’m also curious about like your community. I mean, 2004, it’s not like people are texting back and forth.

Scott Harrison:
Here’s the cool thing. So I had collected about 15,000 emails, which was how we primarily communicated as we’d invite people to clubs and parties. Those people on that email list very quickly went from getting communications: “Hey, come to the Prada megastore party opening in Soho” to “Alford is 14, lives in Liberia and has a tumor. Here’s a picture of his tumor.” So they were—I think they were almost freakishly fascinated. You know, here’s a kid that I was like doing coke with like a month ago in a nightclub. Where is Liberia? Where’s Benin, West Africa? Like, I’ve never even heard of these countries. So I was able to, I think, bring a lot of people along on this journey, and they were seeing it through my eyes. I’d never seen or experienced any of this and was just trying to tell stories and take pictures and share them with people. So I kind of had a built-in audience that I just took to a radically new environment that they found interesting. And there were definitely some unsubscribes. Some people—I hadn’t signed up for this content. Poor people in West Africa. But more often, people would forward the stories, and the list would grow.

Megan Bruneau:
Okay, and at that time I mean this was before you had started charity: water, right? So you were just kind of like had—

Scott Harrison:
I’m just volunteering. You know, email open rates were kind of 100%. This is early—where you got an email and you opened it. You know, not like waking up this morning and we got 350, batch delete, right?

Megan Bruneau:
I don’t even delete it—just like hundreds of thousands of unopened emails.

Scott Harrison:
You’re like my wife. I can’t do that. I have to be inbox zero.

Megan Bruneau:
It’s the perfectionist thing—we’re gonna work on that. Okay, so all right, so you’ve got this email list. I mean, you’re sending the emails, you’re exposing people to this. Some people are like, “I don’t wanna have the mirror held up to me and realize that there are people who are suffering. I’m just gonna unsubscribe.” But most people are thinking, “Wow, like this is pretty profound. I wanna open this, I wanna contribute in some way.” I’m assuming you were in some way asking for charity or—

Scott Harrison:
I then was giving them an opportunity to sponsor these surgeries. So that’s what we would do. We would bring in somebody with a cleft lip or a cleft palate or somebody blind with cataracts. And we would operate on this state-of-the-art medical ship. And then we would set them loose with their sight or with their lips back or their speech back. So that was what was so cool about the experience: that almost every before had an after. So you got to see people go through these absolute life transformations because these doctors had entered into that need for no pay and really at their own expense of both time and money.

Megan Bruneau:
And how gratifying for people who are sponsoring, right? To be able to really see the impact that they were making—you know, as opposed to like, “I’m donating to this charity. I have no idea where my money’s going.”

Scott Harrison:
And that was a piece of one of the pillars later for charity: water around proof and showing people where their money went. Well, let’s just get to water. The second—so I finished the year. Like, this is amazing. I don’t know what’s next. I’m 29. I’m certainly not going back to the clubs. I do go back to New York for a couple months because the ship would finish a tour. It would dry dock. They would kind of fix the ship, get it ready for the next mission. So I went back to New York, and I took a gallery—actually in Chelsea—got it donated, and I put up an exhibition of 100 of my photos, 108 photos. And I invited people to come through the gallery, and then at the end, if they were moved, they could sponsor a surgery for $380. And I wound up raising about $100,000 for Mercy Ships.

And then there was this sense—you actually hit on it earlier—”follow the money.” You know, I’ve got people have skin in the game now. I could go back for a second tour and show them that, you know, the organization hadn’t taken their money and started buying Range Rovers or spending it on—like they were actually just continuing to do more work and more surgeries. So that led me back to a second tour in Liberia. And in that second year is when I really committed to get off the ship, out of the capital city, and into the rural areas to see how people were living. And that’s when I saw people drinking dirty water. And, you know, when you see a child walk up to a green, murky, viscous swamp and then start drinking water that you wouldn’t give to an animal—you wouldn’t give to cattle—and it’s really jarring.

And then, in special contrast to my previous background, I used to sell Voss water for $10 to people who would order 20 bottles and not even open the water—they’d drink Cristal instead. So I think I had like this luxury water club experience, and then I’m watching children poison themselves. And I’m with these doctors who never had enough surgery slots to offer. There were far more sick people that would turn up than we could ever serve. So we would turn thousands of sick people away. And I kind of just put these things together, you know: “Well, if people don’t have the most basic health need met—water—no wonder stuff’s growing on their face. No wonder they’re becoming afflicted with all these diseases.”

And then I sort of start peeling the onion back there and realize that in Liberia, 50% of the disease in the country could be tracked straight back to dirty water and a lack of sanitation and hygiene. And, you know, I remember just thinking: Half of the occupied hospital beds could be emptied if people just had water.

Megan Bruneau:
Had people thought of this before? Or made this connection before and tried to solve the problem? Or was this like you were—

Scott Harrison:
I remember—so at the end of this tour, I come back. Well, I remember there was a really important kind of mentor in my life, this guy called Dr. Gary Parker. He was the moral compass of the ship. He was the chief medical officer for 20-some years. And I remember showing him these photos and saying, “You know, Dr. Gary, like, you should see what people are drinking in these rural villages.” And he was really the one that said: “You know, you could be the greatest medical professional in the world—history of world—if you just got the world water. You could cure hundreds of millions of people of sickness by providing health through water.”

So he was really the one that kind of got me to think, “Well, okay.” I mean, whatever he told me, I probably would have explored. So it was at the end of that second year—you know, I was turning 30—came back to New York, and I thought I had this very clear life’s mission going forward: to bring clean water to every single person in the world, thus providing health and opportunity. And I didn’t even know about the impact on women and girls at the time or education or the local economy. I was really focused on health. Like, you can’t be healthy if you’re drinking from a swamp.

Megan Bruneau:
Okay. So, but I mean, I would imagine a lot of people in your shoes would be like, “Wow, this is a real problem, but like, I don’t know what the technology would be to solve something like this. I’m gonna just keep doing the photojournalism or volunteering in this way that is within, I guess, my skillset.” So I guess how did you shift from there to being like, “Okay, we need to come up with the technology basically to be able to—whether it’s, as you said earlier, certain filters or these like massive scale systems”?

Scott Harrison:
Well, I—when I first came back, at the time there were a billion people on the planet drinking dirty water—a billion—and there were only six billion people on the planet. So one in six people alive. And none of my friends—kind of like me—like this wasn’t on anybody’s radar. No. I was born in a middle-class family in Philadelphia, and like water just came out of taps. Totally. We talked more about the starving children in Africa. The Sally Struthers ads—exactly, more about famine. Water just wasn’t really an issue. So there was very low awareness.

And then I kind of started saying, “Well, you know, who are the water charities that are solving this problem?” The biggest water charity I could find was raising like $15 million a year to meet a hundred-billion-dollar problem—a hundred-billion-dollar-plus problem. So there was really nobody else doing it that I could join or doing it the way that I wanted to do it. And there’s—so that was the mission: to get everybody clean water.

I also just thought charities were kind of lame. You know, as I started looking at the landscape, they were not nightclubs. You know, they were fluorescent-lit cafeterias with styrofoam plates. And, you know, I just thought, “Where’s the Apple of charities? Where’s the Nike? Where’s the Virgin with creativity and imagination and whimsy and inspiration?” So the bigger vision really became: Could I reimagine charity writ large? Could I reinvent charity—come up with a new way of doing things, a new way of inspiring people, building community, reporting back to our donors, solving the problems that people have with charity?

I remember at the time, according to USA Today, 42% of Americans just said they didn’t trust charities. So there’s a lot of cynicism, a lot of skepticism out there. And I thought, “Well, why don’t they trust?” And I started asking people, and they said, “Well, I don’t know where my money goes.” That was kind of the number one. “If I make a donation, I just don’t know how much will actually get to the people who need it.”

And I remember I was completely broke at the time. I was living on a closet floor—Spring and Mercer in Soho, New York City—for free rent. An old club friend had taken me in, and he’s like, “You can sleep in my closet for free while you figure out what you’re doing next.” And I kind of put these two things together: this mission to bring clean water to a billion people, and this desire to build a completely other, different kind of charity—a different kind of organization that would build a movement and inspire people.

Megan Bruneau:
Yeah, it sounds like you almost wanted to bring—you know, it’s interesting when you talked earlier about being like, “What skills did I have as a club promoter that were transferable to being this photojournalist on this ship?” And yet like with this problem you’re trying to solve, it sounds like there was actually a lot of translation there because what I’m hearing is you wanted to implement some element of exclusivity and sexiness and like a desire for people to want to be part of this and have an experience through a charitable organization—which doesn’t sound like it was the case, at least with the traditional charity model out there.

Scott Harrison:
And I think just on the nose—like I was promoting. So I promoted 40 clubs for 10 years. Then I went to Africa and I promoted the amazing work of these doctors and surgeons that would transform people’s lives. And then I came back, and I wanted to promote the idea of clean water for everybody living on earth. And yes—and do it with, you know, in a slightly different way. It was a portable skill, it turned out. I had just been promoting the wrong thing for 10 years.

Megan Bruneau:
Yeah. And I guess this might hit on more of the marketing piece, but I want to get into your development of charity: water shortly. What do you think it was about how you messaged charity: water—or what it was about even the mission itself—that piqued people’s interest and made it something they want to be a part of?

Scott Harrison:
Yeah, I think the visual language was really important. I remember at the time a lot of charities would communicate using statistics, right? You know, “52% of disease is waterborne”—and, I mean, I did it earlier—”spend 204 million hours.” It’s impossible to imagine 204 million hours. It’s a really abstract idea. Yes. So because I had come back from Liberia with 50,000 photos, I was able to show the child drinking from the swamp. I remember putting water under microscopes and showing people video of the microorganisms and parasites that were in the water. So there was this visual language. You could tell people, but if you showed them, it would create a much more visceral reaction. It made it more real.

Megan Bruneau:
Taps into people’s emotions, right? And again, that’s one of the best elements of marketing—best features. It’s like, “Okay, let me have that person make an emotional connection.”

Scott Harrison:
I remember one of the first things we did is I built this outdoor exhibition that sat—or it kind of packed up in the back of a 25-foot Penske truck—and I put dirty water from New York ponds and rivers: from the East River and the Hudson, and a pond in New Jersey and Long Island. I put it in these big plexiglass tanks, juxtaposed with pictures I had taken of people drinking water that just looked just like that. Wow. I said, “Do you want to drink from Central Park Pond? But a billion people are.” And then here’s the solution. It was presenting a problem that had occurred to almost no one, showing that there is a very clear solution, that the problem could be solved 100% of the time, and then the life transformation that comes through solving the problem.

Megan Bruneau:
Yes. I mean, for people—you can imagine at least someone going through that experience—if they have a shred of empathy or the slightest bit of compassion, they’re like, “Wow, this is horrifying. How painful—I feel guilty that I am having this experience in the Western world, and this person is suffering so deeply. I also feel powerless. How can I alleviate some of that powerlessness?” Well, let me donate. There’s this flow chart of what they go through. It’s a way a person can do something actionable to help feel slightly less powerless around something.

And then one of the unique things we did was we created a business model—we being me and a couple of volunteers sitting around—where we promised that 100% of all donations we would ever take would go directly to build these life-saving water projects. And I actually opened up a separately audited bank account and said, “All of that overhead that people hate to pay for—it’s necessary—but I’m gonna go to a small group of visionary donors who don’t mind paying for office rent and staff salaries and Epson toner for the copy machine.” So that if somebody gave $10 or $100 or $10,000 or a million dollars, I could promise every single penny will go directly to solve this problem.

And then kind of the add-on to that was—because money wasn’t fungible—we could build proprietary technology to track those donations down to the village and down to the people who were getting clean water. Because someone gave $8.15, and we could show them: “Your $8.15 went here in Malawi or here in Bangladesh to this village, and there’s 326 people who are benefiting—and here are all the other donors you shared that project costs with.” So this idea of proof was—it seems so simple—but charities just weren’t really set up to track, especially micro donations.

Megan Bruneau:
Gosh, no. I mean, I even recently—I was of course so moved by everything in LA, and I’m like, “Oh, the animals—let me donate for the animals and whatnot,” and then I—like, which one? I don’t know which one to donate to because I can’t tell how much of my money is actually going to them and how much is going to the overhead. So I mean—so innovative of you. And it sounds like—there was no one else doing that before, right? Like, that was not a model that had been developed. And I’m curious—because I imagine everyone listening is thinking this—so you had these separate donors covering the overhead. And like you said, the visionary entrepreneurs/leaders. Was that again the same psychological model—like, “Hey, you can see your impact, here’s the problem, here’s how you can help, have a bigger impact”? Or was it different from—

Scott Harrison:
I mean, it took us a while to kind of work that story out. It’s a great question. You’re deciding—if I’m sitting with you as a potential donor, I’m like: “Are you a jaded, cynical person?” Then I’m gonna sell you the 100%. Or are you someone who might have built a business and realizes that an organization is only gonna be as great as the talent they’re able to recruit and retain? Are you a builder? And you might say, “I’ll give you money to go hire your first employee,” or “to take that flight to go and develop a new program in Uganda,” for example. So I was constantly, as I was fundraising, having to try to put people in these two buckets and make sure I’m selling the right thing.

Megan Bruneau:
But different from fundraising of a typical organization where you’re like, “Hey, you can be an investor, and therefore there will be a trade-off for you.”

Scott Harrison:
And that’s it—we were promising a return on investment: “Help us build this organization which has got wildly ambitious goals that is gonna be a part of bringing clean water to everybody in the world. And while all your money is going to overhead, it’s gonna inspire millions of people to give and to engage in the purest way possible. Like, you’re making it possible for some kid to go sell lemonade—like this little girl Maddie did in Vancouver. She sold 12 weekends in a row—she went out and sold lemonade, and she collected $5,629 or something in lemonade. And all that money went straight to the field.” So you’re saying to a donor, “You’re making that possible.” So we would really tell those stories of people who are so drawn into that idea that it would all make a difference.

Megan Bruneau:
Yes. During that time, you said it took a little bit to work that out. Like, were there any challenges or anything along the—

Scott Harrison:
Talk about some failures. You know, about a year and a half into it—in a way, the 100% model was resonating so deeply, and we’d raised a couple million dollars. And I remember a moment where we had—it was $881,000 in the water account—but we were basically bankrupt in the other account. And we didn’t have a big team—maybe eight or nine people at the time—but we were about to miss payroll. And you know, that was just such a terrible moment because you’re almost like a victim of your own success. Totally. And it was working, but I wasn’t able to find the overhead donors as fast as I was finding the donors who wanted this pure play.

Megan Bruneau:
Do you recall sort of roughly what overhead was at that point?

Scott Harrison:
I think it was about 100 grand a month.

Megan Bruneau:
Okay. The whole org?

Scott Harrison:
Right. And ’cause we’d grown fast—we did 2 million our first year, 6 million our second year. And so I remember just thinking, “This is it.” Like, the advice I was getting at the time was to go and borrow from the water bank account, right? “Hey, write a little IOU. Like, I’ll pay you back later. You have almost nine months of payroll there—just give yourself some more time.” And I remember thinking: If we borrow one penny, there’s a crack in the core of our integrity. There’s a crack in the foundation. Like, I don’t wanna work at that organization.

So I start calling lawyers: “How do you shut down a 501(c)(3) charity?” Because I just had run out of people to ask for overhead, was really dejected and disappointed. I remember praying—my faith… I started a completely non-religious organization, but my personal faith was a piece of this. I’m like, “God, I need a miracle. It’s your idea that everybody gets clean water, right? I bet in heaven, nobody’s walking for dirty water.” And I had no faith, like God’s not gonna answer some prayer.

Strangely enough, mysteriously enough, at this moment of insolvency, I had written a cold email to a British entrepreneur in Silicon Valley six months previous about something completely different—like a different idea for charity: water. He had written back and said, “Cool thing you’re doing, but bad timing for me.” And then right at this moment, he kind of writes me out of the blue and says, “I’m gonna be in New York and I’d love to come by your office and see what you’re up to.” And I remember having this meeting, and I open up my laptop and I’m clicking through all the photos that I’ve taken—like dirty water and wells being drilled and people getting clean water and the 100% model—and all these cool things that we were doing. And I remember just being transparent: “But it’s not working. I can’t find enough people on this side.”

And I remember—he didn’t laugh, he didn’t smile. I thought this guy hated me. This is just deeply non-resonant. And a couple days later, I remember I was just sitting up in bed with a laptop—it was after midnight—and I get this email: “Hey, it’s Michael. Loved meeting you. I wired a million dollars into your overhead account.”

Megan Bruneau:
So just got to you?

Scott Harrison:
And I just—remember, like I was in tears. And I called every single one of the nine people working at charity: water, woke them up—”One fifteen? One twenty-five? Like, a million dollars!” I remember logging onto the bank account and seeing the pending transfer—you know, one comma zero zero zero. And it was about a year of additional runway. Using that time and that money, you know, we were able to build what’s now 135 entrepreneurs and families—and growing—that have supported the 100% model and have helped us raise over a billion dollars and mobilize millions of people.

Megan Bruneau:
Yes. I mean, I’m curious—I don’t know if the term is like social contagion or what term you would use for this—but like now that you have that kind of like “the one,” right? Could you use that as a story to kind of encourage others? Or how do you think that kind of was the domino?

Scott Harrison:
It’s so interesting. And I think—with your background—as I looked back on it, back then I would have said it was always only about the money. It was just about the money. I think what it was more about was that somebody believed in me. And what he really said was: “You need more time. This is an awesome idea, kid. You just need a little more rope to go and work out the business model.” And I think it was that confidence—it was the money plus the confidence—that really gave me kind of a shot in the arm.

We built what today the program is called The Well. And it’s multi-year, it’s multi-tier. And I got to take Michael and his—I mean, that family’s now given over $23 million to overhead. I’ve gotten to take him and his wife and his three kids to 13 countries. And they’ve become dear friends and extraordinary supporters and have brought in so many others—so many of their friends have come because this family trusted us and said, “We’ll give alongside you.” So there was so much there.

He was also a coder, and he helped us code a website called MyCharity:Water where we launched this idea of asking people to donate their birthdays. And instead of accepting gifts or throwing themselves a birthday party, they would ask for their age in dollars. So if you’re turning 32, you would say: “Donate $32 for my 32nd birthday,” and 100% of the money will go. And we’ll track it and show you satellite images of the project that you built with your birthday. You could see it on Google Earth. And he wound up coding that website because we didn’t have any money to pay a big agency. And then that website wound up raising over $100 million for clean water. Wow. So it really became a deeply integral part of the organization.

Megan Bruneau:
Gosh, it sounds like it. I mean, in our last sort of 15 minutes or so, Scott, I just have so many questions. Let me first leave a bit more room for the failure piece. You touched on a couple already that felt like challenges you found your way through. Are there any others that you can speak to that might be meaningful for our listeners to hear?

Scott Harrison:
I think one is just around the business model. So my assumption early on was that all I would have to do is build an organization that made people aware of this problem and then raised money as efficiently as possible. But I didn’t have to do anything on the water delivery side. I mean, like—I’m a club promoter turned photographer. Like, I’m not a hydrogeologist. Totally. I don’t know anything about drilling wells or building solar systems or filtration systems.

My initial premise was: “How am I gonna go find the people to give the money to, to go do the work in Africa and India and Asia?” So there was this watchdog group called Charity Navigator. I said, “Well, they’re gonna know who the best charities are.” So I convinced the CEO of Charity Navigator to come to my apartment, and he sits down next to me on the couch. And I’m kind of clicking through my big ideas of awareness raising and campaigns. And he picks four of their four-star charities. I’m like, “Oh great, I’ll give them the money.”

And wound up doing a campaign for a kind of a family business and a corporate. And they had sold a bunch of product—and I think, you know, $5 from the sale of a piece of product went to charity: water. It turned out to be a big campaign. They gave us $700,000. And we had been telling the story of health clinics in Kenya that needed water. I mean, once you really go down the path of water, it’s amazing how many things it touches. But there were about a third of the health clinics in the world at the time didn’t have water at the hospital. So imagine coming in to get your drugs with muddy river water. So it’s like: “Let me make you well, and then let me poison you.”

So there was this hospital that we’d visited, and the sheets were all brown—literally like brown. Like it looked like Yoo-hoo coming out of the hospital faucets—chocolate milk. And so they had responded to this, and they’d given us the $700,000. And we used 100% of it with one of these four-star partners.

Well, it turns out that half of the projects failed in that there was too much naturally occurring fluoride in the groundwater—in the Rift Valley—to drink. And too much fluoride can damage bones. Like, I’m talking about way too much fluoride. It’s topical now, but this is like, you know, a hundred times. Totally. So it wasn’t all a failure—in half of these projects, the hospital was still able to use it to wash the sheets and to wash medical instruments. But in this donor’s mind, like, half of my money didn’t achieve the results.

And I remember—you know, we audited it, so there wasn’t any question of financial mismanagement. It was just like bad luck. Like, one out of two of the wells you drilled had too much fluoride trapped 300 feet under the ground in the rock. Like, “Try again.” Well, that’s what I thought. But this donor was living and wound up suing us. And there was really no money to give back because you spent the money. But he was really, really angry and sues us for like fraud and breach of contract and incompetence. And here we are—this tiny charity that is being sued. And, you know, thankfully we had pro bono legal counsel and all this stuff. And it was a really difficult time.

We wound up reaching a favorable settlement. But what it taught us was: We have to be good at that too. Like we have to be really good at that. And actually, it was our responsibility. Had I prepared this donor for 50% risk of fluoride in the Rift Valley, he might’ve accepted that and said, “Okay, I’m willing.” Or “I don’t want any of my money going to the Rift Valley. I wanted to go to Uganda where there’s 8% risk of iron in the water.” So our ignorance there was really our fault.

And we had to build then what turned out to be a hugely—almost costly—new part of the organization. Today, it’s best in class, and people come to us because we have teams of people that have vetted 59 partners and 7,000 local staff. And there’s auditing processes and quality control and sustainability practices. But it really—that failure… I mean, “What have I done? This guy thinks that I’m a fraud.” Because we didn’t know what we were doing. And by the way, picking a four-star charity off of a website is not indicative of the work or the knowledge on the ground or the implementation on the ground.

Totally. It’s interesting: Two of the four we still work with today—18 years later—and two of them we would never work with again. Wouldn’t meet our current criteria.

Megan Bruneau:
My gosh. Well, and I imagine at that time—the fear of how could this… the reputational damage that might come?

Scott Harrison:
Yeah, I mean that we would be done. You know, had we lost a lawsuit… Here—I mean the irony was: Here we are trying to restore trust through radical transparency. And yet someone thinks we’ve done the exact opposite.

Megan Bruneau:
Exactly.

Scott Harrison:
So that turned out to be—you know, I wrote a whole chapter in the book about the learnings there. And as difficult as that is—to feel like you’ve let everybody down—you know, it made the organization so much more competent and rigorous. And you know, there’s no way we would have raised over a billion dollars for water had we not had that kind of pretty intense failure.

Megan Bruneau:
I mean, and I know everybody is going to go and get the book after this—Thirst? Yeah. I love it. But for those who don’t or take a while to read it—what were some of the learnings in that chapter?

Scott Harrison:
Yeah, there was another… So that was one, and I kind of talk about just how it all played out and just how hard it was to go through that. And I think most of us want to be liked. And especially if you don’t think you really did anything wrong—and you had the best of intentions—and we just couldn’t convince these people…

Megan Bruneau:
You feel so misrepresented, right? Like, “No, this is not me. I have best of intentions.”

Scott Harrison:
Yeah. So that was—there were a lot of learnings there. And then I think, you know, there was a… So we grew—I think it was eight years in a row—and it was just like a rocket ship. And then we had in our ninth year—we stopped growing. And we had… You know, this was jarring for me. I mean, I thought: “This is gonna go up into the right forever because people need it, and we’re solving the problem, and we’re growing the movement of donors.” And we just had a bad year. We had a couple big donors didn’t come back—their stock market portfolio had gotten hit—and they said, “It’s not you, it’s us.” But we were down in revenue.

And I remember wanting to quit and saying, “Okay, well I’ve tapped out. Now it’s time for a professional CEO.” And I started calling my board and saying, “Maybe it’s time for me to step aside.” And I wanted to take a month off—like a mini sabbatical—and just contemplating: “Well, I’d rather hand the organization off in a better place. Like, could I go and fix it? And could I just take responsibility?”

And a lot of organizations are S-curves. What gets you here does not get you that next wave of growth. And actually, what had gotten us—we raised over 100 million at that time—was peer-to-peer fundraising. It was the birthdays. But then that became ubiquitous. GoFundMe started and CrowdRise started and Facebook Causes started. And everybody and their mother was asking people to donate their birthdays. So this thing that we had an early competitive advantage on had just become commoditized. And also we saw that start to decline.

So I wound up spending a little bit of time with Daniel Ek from Spotify—I’d taken him to Ethiopia, he had built a project—and we’re sitting in the back of a Land Rover, and he says, “You’ve just got—your business model sucks. Like, you got to start over on January 1. And whatever you raise the year before, you have to figure out not how to do all that again, but then to keep growing.” He goes, “I get a subscriber—I’m gonna keep him for life.” And just that kind of… I had never thought of a subscription program for charity: water or a membership community where I could go and win a donor and then keep winning them month after month after month—and they would really stick with us over a period of years or decades.

Megan Bruneau:
To this problem?

Scott Harrison:
This was really only on the water side. Yes. Although the other is a three-year program—and we would hope that at the end of every three years with an overhead donor, to have proved to them that we’re such good stewards that we renew them for another three years. But this was kind of like: You could give $10 for life, right? You can give $10 now, $20 when you get a better job or…

Megan Bruneau:
And is that monthly subscription?

Scott Harrison:
It’s monthly, yeah. So I came back from the sabbatical and said, “I’m not going to quit. Let me try and launch this.” And it tripled the organization. It took us from raising—what?—40, 45 million at the time to 90 million just a couple of years later. And it really worked. And now, interestingly 18 years in, we’re kind of at that moment again where we’re a little flat. It’s a lot of impact—I mean, we’re helping over one and a half million new people get water now every year. We’ve helped 20 million people.

The global problem is down to 700 million. So we’ve gone from one in six on the planet without water to one in 10. And that’s largely because—we’ve helped. We’ve done one 35th of what the current problem set is. We’ve raised a lot of awareness. A lot of other actors have gotten into it. But it really feels solvable. But we’re sitting around thinking: What got us here is not going to get us to that next wave of movement. And what do we try? So there’s this kind of constant need to innovate and continue to reinvent the organization and reinvent yourself. And we’re in that…

Megan Bruneau:
Sounds like you’re in that right now.

Megan Bruneau:
You know, one of the things I think a lot of people are wondering is: Here’s this guy who is obviously brilliant, has a network like no one I’ve ever known, is not afraid to go do something out of his comfort zone, is an innovator clearly. And you know, he could be running in Silicon Valley with the rest of them and making, you know, a billion dollars a year, right? And yet you’ve chosen to go this nonprofit route—where at least if I understand, there is a ceiling.

Scott Harrison:
Yeah. Of course there are other… I froze my salary seven years ago.

Megan Bruneau:
Right. So I mean—that, again, it just seems so noble. And also, yeah—I guess I’m wondering, like, are there ever times where you think, “Oh, here I am stuck. We’ve hit the ceiling again here—after 18 years—and I wish I had just gone off and done something where I would have the sort of financial security and freedom that I could have if I’d gone another direction”?

Scott Harrison:
I think my past in the 10 years of being around wealth and having kind of disposable income to buy things was really helpful in kind of curbing the appetite for that. And you know, it’s interesting. I mean, I’m around billionaires, and I’ve gotten to speak on Necker Island and take my family. And you know, wealth and happiness—not necessarily.

So I think mission and purpose… I know a lot of entrepreneurs who have sold their company for half a billion dollars, and then they play and they travel around the world. They buy all the things that they could never buy—and they buy a plane, and they buy a horse ranch… But they’re not working. And they’re not really doing anything except spending money and playing. And I’ve seen so many of them—a couple of years later—”Man, I really need to work again. Like, I need to build something.” Totally. There’s that existential…

I’m kind of lucky that the mission is so clear. We’re definitely not done because 700 million people are still waiting. I know how to get 700 million people water, but I haven’t built the movement. I haven’t convinced enough people to give $10 a month or $10 million or to join the overhead program. You know, there’s so much unfinished work. It feels like we’re in the beginning of the second inning of the game.

And I have kids in public school—and the public schools are great. And we have a four-bedroom house, and like I drive a Kia and a used truck. Like I don’t need to drive a Range Rover or a Land Rover. I’m not… You know, my son wants me to rent a Corvette one day so he can ride in a Corvette. I don’t really aspire to those things. And we’re so blessed. And the places where I travel—I mean, my middle-class life is like elite. It’s people that don’t have water. They don’t have a roof. They don’t know where their food is coming from. So I don’t spend any time feeling sorry for myself.

Like, the idea of nobility in this work is a foreign concept to most people that you would interview who are leading an organization or working in a nonprofit. This is just like what we do. This is what we’re called to do, and we get to do this. I would rather bring people clean water than maybe go build a shopping app. And there’s nothing wrong with a shopping app—and shopping apps have given us lots of money to have clean water. But my personal mission is so clear and unfinished.

Megan Bruneau:
I mean, it seems like… Things I hear there is: There’s so much meaning in this for you, whereas that’s not inherent in everything. You also get a lot of perspective through your travel—being able to see, “Wow, my middle-class life is the most luxurious, unattainable thing for most people.” And there’s always still challenge for you, whereas I think a lot of people dream of, “Oh, I just can’t wait until I exit my company for a billion dollars.” That’s maybe not it, right? Like there’s something in the challenge or something in that kind of like being in the process that actually is—what was the Ryan Holiday quote? Like “the obstacle is the way,” you know? Actually kind of being like, “Well, we still got 700 million people.” Is that the number?

Scott Harrison:
Yeah. 700 million people are still waiting. And like—we have 18 years of competence now—we know how to solve this. I just need to convince more people to join the movement, to give generously, resist the apathy that is so easy to embrace with any paralyzing global issues, and say, “Yeah, I could help people get water. $40 gets one person clean water.” Think about all the people that can give $40 and just move that one person from unsafe water to clean water.

Megan Bruneau:
I think—

Megan Bruneau:
I imagine for so many people listening—who maybe aren’t 100% sure what they’re motivated by—like “wanna-be entrepreneur,” or “I wanna build this company,” or “I’ve started building this company,” or “I wanna leave my full-time job and make my side hustle full-time.” If they shift motivation from money/success/”never work again” to meaning, perspective, learning, service, or gratification…

Scott Harrison:
Yeah.

Megan Bruneau:
That might allow a completely different relationship to their work.

Scott Harrison:
You know, I’ll say on stage sometimes: If you’re just asking a simple question—”How can I use what I’ve been given to serve others? To end needless suffering?”—that could be in your local community or the global community. For a lot of people, it’s both: “Let me serve those around me, and let me serve people thousands of miles away because I can.”

Megan Bruneau:
Well, we’re at time. Before we wrap: Any advice—maybe three pieces—for listeners on the entrepreneurial journey navigating failures/challenges?

Scott Harrison:
Yeah. I think integrity is really important. If I hold one value above all, it’s that how you do something > what you do. I teach my kids that. Be completely truthful. Had we borrowed that $800K and compromised our promise, we wouldn’t have this organization today. There have been hard decisions where things get gray, and we do what’s most right with highest integrity. We see companies tank when people get caught—integrity inspires people.

Second: Perseverance and grit. You gotta keep going. There are dark seasons—you’re tired, want to quit, haven’t done enough. Wouldn’t it be easier to have a boss? I’ve thought, “I don’t want to be the boss. Just let me work for someone else.” But you go to sleep with all the problems churning. Persevere—you never know who’ll walk in and give you $1M that turns into $23M.

Megan Bruneau:
What does perseverance look like to you?

Scott Harrison:
Staying the course. Many in nonprofits do this a while, then go make money—”I did my term.” For me: I said I’d get everybody clean water. I keep trying until everyone has it. If we’re at 72M when I die, I die trying.

Megan Bruneau:
Perseverance sounds like commitment.

Scott Harrison:
Yeah. Third: If you’re in nonprofits, have fun. Fundraising’s first three letters are F-U-N. The sector’s plagued with poverty mentality, “woe is me,” cynicism toward donors—”How can they live in $20M homes but only give $200?” Shed that. Have fun, be creative—it helps you persevere.

Megan Bruneau:
How do you have fun now?

Scott Harrison:
I love travel, coaching baseball (I have 3 kids), Dollywood/theme parks, taking kids to Universal. As a storyteller, I love seeing movies alone. If I’m traveling with extra time, I’ll sneak into a 2:30 pm theater in Columbus, Ohio, to watch a great story.

Megan Bruneau:
Amazing. Well, pickleball’s big now—

Scott Harrison:
I’m a terrible pickleball player!

Megan Bruneau:
We’ll play sometime—we can both be bad. Where can people find you?

Scott Harrison:
charitywater.org. I’m @scottharrison on social (a terrible poster). The book Thirst is a New York Times bestseller—all proceeds go to charity: water.

Megan Bruneau:
Incredible, Scott. You’re an inspiration. Thank you for being my first in-person studio guest.

Scott Harrison:
Of course.

Megan Bruneau:
Many more to come.

Megan Bruneau, M.A. Psych is a therapist, executive coach, and the founder of Off The Field Executive & Personal Coaching. She hosts The Failure Factor podcast featuring conversations with entrepreneurs about the setbacks that led to their success.