Scott Harrison’s twenties were spent in New York nightclubs. He was a promoter, paid to get the right people into the right rooms and keep them drinking. He was good at it. He was also, by his own account, miserable, drinking too much, using drugs, and emptying out. At twenty-eight, spiritually bankrupt in a way that no amount of bottle service could fix, he volunteered as a photographer on Mercy Ships, a floating hospital that provides free surgeries in West Africa.
What he saw in Liberia changed the trajectory of his life. People drinking from the same rivers they bathed in and used as toilets. Children with facial tumors caused by contaminated water. Women walking hours each day to collect water that was making their families sick. Harrison came back to New York and, in 2006, founded charity: water with a specific promise: 100% of public donations would go directly to water projects. Operating costs would be covered by a separate group of private donors.
The 100% model was and remains controversial in the nonprofit world. Most charities use a portion of every dollar donated to cover salaries, offices, and overhead. Harrison argued that separating the two streams would attract donors who distrusted traditional charities. He was right. charity: water raised over $100 million in its first decade and funded clean water projects for more than seven million people.
The book covers both the personal transformation and the organizational challenges. Harrison describes the specific anxiety of running an organization that depends on two separate revenue streams, either of which could dry up at any moment. He describes the difficulty of verifying that water projects actually work, which led charity: water to develop GPS sensor technology that monitors well functionality remotely. He describes the tension between his marketing instincts, which told him to tell dramatic stories, and the reality that sustainable water solutions are not dramatic. They are pipes and filters and wells that work quietly for years.
Harrison writes with the energy of someone who still cannot quite believe his own story. The nightclub sections are vivid without being self-pitying. The Africa sections are moving without being exploitative. The organizational sections are honest about the difficulties of running a nonprofit that wants to operate like a startup.
The book was a New York Times bestseller. Harrison has continued leading charity: water, which as of this writing has funded over 100,000 water projects in 29 countries. Whether the 100% model is the best way to run a charity is debatable. That it has mobilized a generation of donors who might not have given otherwise is not.
