My moment of change whilst creating hype for clean water
yesterday was my 40th birthday
and i was really excited when i was
first started to speak at tedx
winchester
because that’s where it happened that’s
where i was born
so here i am 40 years later
and the average life in the uk for a
woman is 81 years
so this is it official middle
age but i’m lucky if i was born
somewhere else like the central african
republic
i’d be entering the last quarter of my
life whether my average life expectancy
would be 54 years
so this really is a milestone and it
makes me think
what have i done with my life am i happy
with it
what have i achieved with the relative
privilege of being born in winchester
i’m really lucky to be the managing
director of an organization
called charity water here in the uk and
we’re on a mission
to end the water crisis to bring clean
water to every person
on the planet which is a lot right now
785 million people living without access
to clean water
and that’s about one in ten of us and
i love my job i really love this charity
and not just because of the critical
mission
but because of the way the charity works
it’s an organization which is built on
pretty much
obsessed with values generosity
excellence integrity innovation
100 of every donation made publicly
is sent to countries which score low on
the un’s human development index
a system which uses how long and healthy
lives are the level of education people
receive
and the general standard of living to
give a score and rank how the country is
doing
every single penny is given to local
charity partners in these countries
to bring clean water to people in a
sustainable way
and in a way which best suits their
geography and their needs
and together we prove each one of these
projects with photos
gps coordinates and a map on our website
we also report back to many of our
donors exactly which of these projects
their donations funds
pretty radical transparency i actually
had a very different talk planned
for this event when it was going to
happen in person
in winchester and we’d all have been in
a room
together 2019 was
a good year for me personally my family
was happy
and healthy we’d adopted two cats
charity water had grown over 200 percent
and we’d funded clean water for another
50
000 people and i apologize because
there’s background noise right now
because it’s my son
and because things have changed so my
original talk
my original talk was going to be about
how big change for most of us doesn’t
happen that often
that things accumulate and reiterate and
gradually shift over time
that we only really achieve big change
when we come together
to make big positive things happen
together using our voices and our
actions and our generosity
i see this when a village which has
never had clean water before
gets access thanks to the collective
input
of donors around the world extensive
project management
an amazing local charity partner village
elders
training and the actions of community
members
a drilling team hydrologists it changes
everything which despite all that work
and all those people can feel like
something which happens overnight it
impacts education
gender equity health and for every one
pound invested in clean water
the economic return is between four and
twelve pounds
so that was the talk that change for
most of us
is slow and iterative and doesn’t happen
that much
and that we only make big change happen
when we come together
and i was focused on positive change and
energy
and then things did change for all of us
for me
um covert hit and
things were unexpected and things felt
out of control and it wasn’t something
we felt we’d come together to achieve
it felt like very much like it happened
to me
to us and it’s been lonely
to be confined to our homes to our
communities to our countries
so in a bid to feel less lonely i
thought i’d
change this talk slightly because change
has happened
and i’d share what the experience has
been for me
personally professionally and to make
sure that that 40 years i’ve lived so
far and this my 41st year
feels like i’m achieving something still
the day
about six months ago when i learned that
my children then age three and seven
could no longer go to school or to
nursery or to their child-minder
it was a hard day i broke a bit in the
early evening
i went upstairs to my bed alone
and i cried i cried for a really
long time until then i hadn’t realized
the fragility of the system
which we’d built around our family a
system which meant that my children
could feel
safe and cared for and educated
and even loved while their father
freddie and i
went to work in our family
like in many i know i’m the one who’s
always been responsible for arranging
childcare
and freddie is a doctor for the nhs
so looking after and educating our kids
became my responsibility and it felt
like a time of reckoning
that my children at home with me all day
would realize i’m not really a good
mother
there wasn’t space for strategic
thinking
or creativity freddie’s work is
essential
hard and potentially dangerous
but there are days when i’ve resented
him
until this moment our
careers our lives have always felt very
much in balance
and equal then it changed
he got on his bike every morning
and cycled off to work to do really
important work
while i stayed at home with our children
and my job both of which needed
new and attention in ways i’d never had
to give it before
like many industries charities have been
hit hard by the pandemic
it’s estimated that we’ll lose about
12.4 billion pounds
of revenue this year and bond a network
for
international development organizations
estimates
that about 40 45
of international charities will close
this year
there were campaigns for government
emergency funding
and it came slowly but it was aimed at
charities
doing work for people affected by the
pandemic and by the economic fallout
here
in the uk charity water supports many
local organizations doing this work
in their local communities
internationally since
early on our partners have been training
people on social distancing
awareness of the dangers of the
coronavirus the importance of hand
washing
so we’re not the target for this
government emergency funding
and anyway we’re a charity that is
designed to get people and brands
excited about
generosity and about helping people on
the other side of the world
we’re not set up for institutional
grants
so with some of those brands who usually
give to us generously closed
uh like many organizations we had to
look at ourselves and our work
and how to do it efficiently and we had
to let staff go
in the u.s there are nearly 100
employees and internationally through
our local partners
we employ hundreds more but here in the
uk our london office
the first fundraising office outside new
york
there are just three of us and so i had
to take that team
of three to just me
that was tough i miss my co-workers i
miss my friends
and i feel guilty that i wasn’t able
to save their jobs we wanted to bring
people together in 2020 we were so
excited
we planned to spur generosity to bring
clean water to 70
000 more people who needed it and
now that won’t happen to that size
without three of us here in the uk
our impact will not be so great and so
many people won’t get clean water
and that breaks my heart but i did
promise
to not only share what i’ve found
difficult
and struggled with over the past few
months
but also what i’ve done to try and
refine that purpose
what i’ll do with my 41st year and how i
feel about it
and really i’ve had to focus on
not the size of my impact but to come
back
to my intent before working at charity
water i did a lot of research
into the organization to be sure it was
somewhere i wanted to give
my time and my career and to really
dedicate myself to
it’s known in the charity sector for
being a cool brand for
having this radical transparent 100
model
for using technology and doing really
exciting things
and it’s also known for having a founder
who was once
a nightclub promoter in new york
who gave it all up to volunteer on a
hospital ship in liberia
before founding charity water which is
now amongst the top
250 charities in america
so lots of people know us because of all
that
but that’s not why i wanted to work at
charity water
i wanted to work at charity water after
coming across the story
of a woman called mulitani who lived in
a rural village
in malawi usually when you read stories
of people case studies
from charities you feel sadness
you feel pity you feel concerned
and when i read about mulitani i didn’t
feel any of those things
i really felt inspired i felt like i
wanted to learn from molotani and i
wanted to be
more like molotani when clean water came
to mulitani’s village
she was a similar age to me 42.
unlike me she had six children to take
care of and
for those first 42 years of her life
she had only been able to get water from
a river outside her village
every day she would get up early before
her family to collect water
she’d walk across difficult terrain then
wait her turn with other women to
collect water
dirty water and bring it back to her
family
once home she’d bathe and feed her
children send them off to school
then walk back again to collect more
water
as well as cooking cleaning farming
taking care of animals and all the other
stuff of life
she would make this trip seven times a
day
carrying 20 kilograms of water on every
trip
and knowing that the water she toiled
for could make her family sick
but despite all of this mulitani was
smiling and
genuinely happy the charity water team
spent time getting to know her
and other people in her village they
filmed their whole community
collectively make change happen
every family living in the village
volunteered one person and materials to
build a road across the ravine
a road they needed if a drilling rig was
to draw a borehole
for a well and bring clean water
during this time our team asked molotani
about the joy she literally
radiated how why life was tough
dirty water meant diarrhoea and disease
but mulitani replied that her name in
her language
had a meaning it meant what will you do
with it
so every day she woke up and asked
herself
what will i do with it i’m coming back
to mulitani now
and her story and i’m really trying
to learn from her and to embrace her
approach
to wake up every morning in my 41st year
and to ask myself what will i do with it
at home at work which are now the same
thing
the hardest thing is that so many of us
had all these plans for this year
i plan to bring clean water with my team
to 70 000 people
that won’t happen i may not have that
size of an impact
but the absolute minimum i can do to
make sure i stick to that intent
is to personally join the spring and to
give clean water to one person myself
every single month if i’m doing that i’m
still achieving something
and if i ask family and friends and you
and other people to join me
in doing that then we’re doing even more
and hopefully although it’s in a totally
different way to what i had planned
eventually we will get that clean water
to 70 000 people you may not be
passionate about bringing people clean
water you may be passionate about
something
else but the exciting thing is
that even when we’re at home we have the
ability
to make a difference to be generous to
be kind
to think of other people to give and to
also get angry
so every day i’m waking up
i’m thinking what will i do with it and
as a parent
i’m trying to give that attitude to my
children too
and what i want them to do with it is to
think about other people
to think about how they can work with
other people
and do something for other people
because we all focus on that and we make
that happen
then change will happen
thank you