Founded by a former New York City nightclub promoter, charity: water has become one of the most recognizable organizations tackling the global water crisis. Its approach combines entrepreneurship, technology, transparency, and a simple belief: everyone deserves clean water.
Imagine waking up tomorrow morning without running water.
No shower. No kitchen faucet. No reliable way to wash your hands, prepare breakfast, or fill a glass with water you know is safe to drink.
For most Americans, this would be an emergency.
For billions of people around the world, inadequate access to safe drinking water remains an everyday reality.
According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, approximately 2.1 billion people lacked safely managed drinking water in 2024. That means their drinking-water services did not meet all three standards: accessible on premises, available when needed, and free from contamination.
Of those, 106 million people depended directly on surface water from sources such as rivers and lakes.
These numbers represent more than an infrastructure problem. They reflect lost opportunities for education, economic productivity, public health, and human development.
One organization has spent the past 20 years trying to change that.
charity: water is a nonprofit founded in 2006 by entrepreneur Scott Harrison, who built the organization around an unusually powerful proposition: 100% of public donations would fund clean-water projects.
Today, charity: water has helped finance water infrastructure across dozens of countries and developed a philanthropic model that offers important lessons for businesses, entrepreneurs, and organizations everywhere.
Its story demonstrates how a clearly defined mission, innovative financing, modern technology, and an insistence on accountability can mobilize people around an enormous global challenge.
From Nightclub Promoter to Humanitarian Entrepreneur
Before founding charity: water, Scott Harrison spent nearly a decade promoting nightclubs in New York City.
He worked in an industry built around entertainment, exclusivity, marketing, and persuading people to spend money on experiences.
Eventually, Harrison began questioning the direction of his life.
He volunteered as a photographer with Mercy Ships, a humanitarian organization that operates hospital ships providing medical services to communities with limited access to healthcare.
During his time in West Africa, Harrison encountered communities living with extreme poverty and unsafe drinking water.
The experience changed his understanding of the relationship between water, health, and economic opportunity.
He realized that providing safe water could help address problems extending far beyond thirst.
In 2006, he founded charity: water.
His initial fundraising efforts drew upon the skills and relationships he had developed in the entertainment industry. He organized events, told compelling stories, and invited people to participate in a mission larger than themselves.
Instead of asking people to purchase an expensive nightclub experience, he invited them to help finance clean water for communities in need.
What began as an entrepreneurial experiment grew into a global nonprofit movement.
The 100% Model: Rethinking How Charities Are Funded
One of charity: water’s most distinctive innovations is its financing structure.
The organization promises that 100% of public donations designated for clean water will fund water projects.
That raises an obvious question.
Who pays employees? Who covers technology, accounting, fundraising, travel, and administrative expenses?
charity: water developed a separate funding structure for those costs.
A group of private donors called The Well helps fund the organization’s operating expenses, alongside support from corporate partners, investment earnings, and donated goods or services.
The organization maintains separate accounts for public water-project donations and operating funding.
This allows it to tell a prospective donor that their contribution will be allocated to water-related programs rather than its organizational overhead.
Even credit-card processing fees are covered so they do not reduce the amount committed to water projects.
The approach addresses an important challenge in philanthropy: trust.
Donors naturally want to understand what happens to their money.
charity: water has built much of its identity around making that process visible.
But the model deserves one important clarification.
A 100% program-funding model does not mean running the organization costs nothing.
Those costs are real. They are simply financed by a different group of supporters. Water-project budgets can also include legitimate in-country support expenses such as monitoring and local administration.
The deeper innovation is therefore not the elimination of overhead, but the separation and transparency of funding.
For entrepreneurs, there is an interesting lesson here.
Sometimes, a breakthrough business model does not require inventing an entirely new product.
It requires finding a better way to organize resources, establish trust, and connect people with a valuable outcome.
The Results: More Than One Million People Reached in 2025
After two decades of operations, charity: water has achieved substantial scale.
According to its published fiscal-year 2025 results, public donations funded more than 22,000 water projects across 20 countries, and the organization reported that 1.41 million people gained access to clean and safe water for the first time.
The organization also publishes annual financial reports, independent audit reports, tax filings, and documentation of its donation-allocation model.
Its 2025 financial statements received an unmodified audit opinion from KPMG, according to charity: water.
These disclosures are important because nonprofit effectiveness should be examined through evidence rather than marketing alone.
The organization publishes project information with photographs, geographic coordinates, and details about the communities served.
Its broader cumulative project figures include both completed projects and projects still under construction, while some cumulative beneficiary totals represent people expected to receive access rather than independently verified users of completed systems.
Those distinctions are important when evaluating reported impact.
Even with these qualifications, the organization’s scale illustrates what sustained fundraising and implementation partnerships can accomplish.
Why Clean Water Creates Value Far Beyond Drinking
Clean water is one of the most fundamental inputs into a productive society.
Its benefits extend into almost every aspect of daily life.
Better health
Contaminated drinking water can transmit pathogens responsible for diarrhea and other infectious diseases.
Improved water quality, combined with sanitation and hygiene, can reduce exposure to disease-causing organisms.
This is especially important for young children, whose health can be severely affected by repeated infections.
More time for education
In communities without nearby water infrastructure, obtaining drinking water may require lengthy daily trips.
The responsibility often falls disproportionately on women and girls.
A 2023 WHO/UNICEF report found that women and girls were primarily responsible for collecting water in seven out of ten households that lacked water supplies on their premises.
When a dependable water source becomes accessible closer to home, families may spend less time obtaining water and more time on education, employment, and other activities.
Greater economic productivity
Water is essential for cooking, sanitation, food production, healthcare, and local businesses.
When households spend hours collecting water, they sacrifice time that could otherwise support productive work.
And when illness becomes more common because of unsafe water, families may face additional medical expenses and lost income.
Reliable water infrastructure can help reduce those burdens.
The economic value of water is therefore much greater than the market price of the water itself.
It represents time, health, reliability, and opportunity.
Technology Is Becoming an Important Part of the Solution
One of the most interesting aspects of charity: water is its willingness to invest in technology.
Building a well or installing a water system is only the beginning.
For a community, the real goal is reliable access to safe water over many years.
That creates an engineering and maintenance challenge.
Pumps can break. Pipes can leak. Water sources can become unreliable. Spare parts may be difficult to obtain.
If a water system fails and remains unrepaired, a community can lose the benefits of the original investment.
charity: water has responded by developing remote-monitoring technologies that use sensors and cloud-based systems to track water-system performance.
Its sensor research-and-development program reports collecting data covering approximately 25 million liters of water per month, with more than 20 organizations piloting its technology.
The concept is simple but powerful.
Instead of relying entirely on occasional physical inspections, remote sensors can provide information about water-system activity.
That information can help local maintenance teams identify failures and prioritize repairs.
This represents a broader opportunity at the intersection of technology and infrastructure.
The most valuable innovation may not be building more infrastructure, but making existing infrastructure more dependable.
The same principle applies to municipal water utilities, electric grids, buildings, transportation networks, and industrial facilities.
Sensors, software, predictive maintenance, and better operating systems can potentially extend the useful life of physical assets and improve the value society receives from them.
The Hardest Part: Keeping the Water Flowing
Clean-water infrastructure is not a one-time problem.
A well that works when it is installed may fail years later.
A community may struggle to finance repairs or replace equipment.
A water source that was once reliable may be affected by drought, population growth, or environmental changes.
These realities make long-term maintenance essential.
charity: water says it works through local implementation partners, trains mechanics, supports community water committees, and coordinates with local governments.
Its programs also include monitoring and evaluation intended to assess whether water systems remain functional.
That approach recognizes a basic engineering truth: every physical system requires ongoing maintenance.
For donors, the most useful questions go beyond how many wells have been funded.
How many systems are still working five or ten years later?
How quickly are broken pumps repaired?
Is water quality tested regularly?
Can local communities afford replacement components?
Are the improvements sustained without permanent dependence on outside donations?
These are the questions that distinguish a successful installation from a durable public-health investment.
They are also the kinds of questions sophisticated philanthropists should ask of any infrastructure-focused nonprofit.
What Other Charities Can Learn From charity: water
charity: water offers several lessons for organizations seeking to accomplish more with limited resources.
The first is the importance of a clearly defined mission.
The organization has built its identity around a problem that virtually anyone can understand: the need for safe drinking water.
The second is the importance of donor trust.
Financial disclosures, project documentation, and a transparent funding structure help supporters understand the organization’s approach.
The third is the value of professional execution.
Effective philanthropy requires many of the same capabilities as a successful business: financial management, technology, procurement, skilled employees, operational discipline, and measurable results.
The fourth is the importance of local partnerships.
Water systems must work within the communities they serve. Long-term success depends upon people who understand local geography, institutions, engineering needs, and social conditions.
Finally, successful organizations must continually improve.
A willingness to examine failures, adopt new technology, and invest in maintenance may prove just as important as raising more money.
An Important Distinction: Transparency Is Not the Same as Effectiveness
charity: water’s funding model is appealing, but one number cannot establish whether a charity is the most effective use of philanthropic capital.
Independent evaluator Charity Navigator currently lists charity: water as a Four-Star Charity, reflecting favorable ratings through its evaluation framework.
That is a positive indicator of organizational accountability.
But even excellent financial practices do not automatically prove that an intervention produces the greatest possible social benefit per dollar donated.
Researchers at GiveWell, which evaluates global-health and poverty-reduction programs, emphasize comparing expected outcomes, costs, and the strength of available evidence.
The distinction is useful.
A compelling mission attracts supporters.
Strong financial controls build confidence.
But lasting social value depends on whether the intervention produces meaningful, sustained improvements in people’s lives.
charity: water’s emphasis on maintenance and monitoring is particularly important in this context.
The strongest measure of success will always be the availability of safe water to the people who need it—not simply the number of projects launched.
A Lesson for Charlotte’s Business Community
Charlotte has long been a center of finance, banking, entrepreneurship, and business development.
The city’s business community understands how capital, technology, and management can transform industries.
charity: water offers an opportunity to apply those same capabilities to a humanitarian challenge.
Imagine more entrepreneurs treating global problems as opportunities to design sustainable solutions.
More engineers developing affordable water-monitoring technologies.
More companies using their supply chains and technical expertise to support essential infrastructure.
More philanthropists evaluating their investments through measurable, long-term outcomes.
Financial capital matters, but so do human talent, technology, operational expertise, and the willingness to solve difficult problems.
For Charlotte’s entrepreneurs and business leaders, the lesson is relevant whether they support international charities or work to improve housing, healthcare, water infrastructure, and economic opportunity here in North Carolina.
The question is not merely how much money can be raised.
It is how effectively available resources can be organized to improve human lives.
The Power of One Clear Mission
Twenty years after its founding, charity: water continues pursuing an enormous goal: making clean and safe drinking water accessible to everyone.
Achieving that mission will require much more than charitable donations.
It will require infrastructure investment, engineering innovation, effective local governance, responsible water management, and ongoing cooperation between communities, businesses, nonprofits, and governments.
But charity: water has demonstrated something important.
An organization can begin with a simple idea and build a movement around it.
Scott Harrison did not begin with a global water utility, an engineering company, or a government agency.
He began with a mission, a network of relationships, and an entrepreneurial willingness to challenge the way things had been done.
Two decades later, that mission has attracted millions of supporters and financed water systems around the world.
The broader lesson extends far beyond philanthropy.
The most meaningful ventures are often those that identify a fundamental human need and organize people, technology, and resources to meet it.
Clean water is not a luxury.
It is a foundation for health, dignity, education, and economic opportunity.
And few investments have a more fundamental purpose than making that foundation available to everyone.
Help Bring Clean Water to More People
Clean water is one of the most meaningful gifts we can help provide. It supports healthier families, stronger communities, better educational opportunities, and human dignity.
If this story inspires you to make a difference, I invite you to support my personal fundraising campaign for charity: water.
Your contribution supports charity: water’s mission to bring clean and safe drinking water to communities around the world.
Together, we can help make clean water accessible to more people.
Learn more about the organization at charitywater.org.
Sources and Further Reading
- WHO/UNICEF: Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, 2000–2024
- charity: water: 2025 Annual Report and Financial Disclosures
- charity: water: Our Approach
- charity: water: The 100% Model
- charity: water: Sensors Research and Development
- Charity Navigator: charity: water Evaluation
- GiveWell: Understanding Cost-Effectiveness
Editorial disclosure: This article is an independent examination of charity: water and its philanthropic model. It is not sponsored by or affiliated with charity: water. Program figures are attributed to the organization, while broader drinking-water statistics come from WHO/UNICEF. The publisher has included a link to a personal charity: water fundraising campaign.