Redemption with charity founder Scott Harrison

0:00A lot of people are cynical about charity and charitable giving. and may have every right to be. So much of our money that we give to charity never makes it to the cause. In fact, only a small percentage often does. Too much goes to the overhead, disproportionately high. Scott Harrison is the founder of Charity Water and they are the complete opposite. He figured out a model where 100 % of public donations goes directly to the cause, But that's only a part of the story. What makes Scott remarkable is his journey of someone who lived a decadent, wasteful, and selfish life and completely converted to a life of service.

0:52This is a bit of optimism.

0:58Scott, it is so good to see you. You're one of my favorite people in the world. Every time I talk to you, I walk away enriched and inspired. You are not like the standard person in your industry, which is a good thing. And the industry you're in is charity. Non-profit. Even the industry starts out with - I know. They define themselves by what they're not. I know. You wear black, you're buttoned up all the way to the top because you're cool. I'm just cold. I'm just cold here. Your wife is a globally recognized, famous designer. I mean, you should be in tech or some cool creative industry, but you went into charity.

1:46How... I mean, I know your story. it didn't start out that way. It didn't start out that way. Look, I think my life is kind of three acts. I was born in a very middle class family in Philadelphia. My dad was a business guy. My mom was a writer for the newspaper. And when I was four, there was this really formative tragedy that happened. There was a carbon monoxide gas leak in our home. And on New Year's Day, 1980, my mother collapses unconscious on the bedroom floor. So she was the canary in the coal mine, which led to visits from the gas company, detectors, finally the discovery of huge amounts of carbon dioxide in her bloodstream, and then the actual leak, which was this furnace in the basement that was just improperly installed.

2:40And, you know, had this continued, we all could have died. My dad and I had a bunch of symptoms. we wound up bouncing back and my mom never did. So she became permanently disabled. She was an invalid for the rest of my life. And what happened to her was her immune system just irreparably shut down. And it just was unable to process the world. Anything chemical. You know, if it was a car fume, it would knock her out. If it was, you know, perfume or soap or, you know, the ink from books would make her sick. And what this resulted in was just her living in isolation, basically. So she would live in these special rooms covered in tinfoil, and she would sleep on army cots that were washed in baking soda 20 times.

3:30And she wore masks. So I just never saw my mom's face. It was always covered with a 3M mask, you know, some version of the N95. And she would cycle and try them all. So I grew up as an only child in a very religious, conservative Christian home. And I grew up in this, in the church. I wanted to be a doctor. And if you'd asked me in childhood, you know, Scott, what are you going to be when you grow up? I was going to cure my mom and I was going to cure all the other sick people that I'd met with a similar condition. and I didn't smoke I didn't drink I didn't do drugs I didn't curse and I didn't sleep around so that was act one I think people know where this is going I mean this setup is amazing for this beautiful child

4:21and act two was this radical rebellion moment where I woke up one day and said no, I'm not going to be a doctor. I'm not going to be a good church kid. I want to have sex. I want to try drugs. I want to drink. I want to smoke. I want to travel the world. I want to drive a fast car. I want a Rolex watch. I want to date supermodels. And I actually found there was a job where you could have a shot at many of these things, and it was called a nightclub promoter. And if you could get the right people inside the right New York City clubs, and if you could kind of orchestrate this magic past the velvet rope, past the one-way glass, you could charge people astronomical amounts to buy drinks.

5:11You could sell a thousand dollar bottle of champagne that only cost you 40. You could sell a$25 vodka Red Bull that cost you 25 cents to make. So to the horror of my parents, to the horror of their church friends, I moved to New York City at 18 and I joined a band I grow my hair down on my shoulder you know the band breaks up because we were a disaster and I become this club promoter and I work at 40 clubs over the next 10 years and I'm climbing up New York City social ladder I probably got to top eight you know there were eight of us running nightlife in in New York City but you know over Over the 10 years, it was a selfish life.

5:54I did start smoking two packs a day. I did start drinking heavily. I did start with marijuana and then cocaine and MDMA and ecstasy. I had a gambling problem. I had a pornography problem. All of the vices that you might imagine would come with a job where you go to the club at midnight and then you go to the after hours at 5 a.m. And then you go home at noon and pop a couple Ambien, you know, to try to put yourself to sleep while other people are on their lunch break eating salads. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, if you looked at me at 28, I had some of these markers of success that I'd collected. I had the BMW.

6:33I had the Rolex watch. My girlfriend was on the cover of fashion magazines. I had a nice loft in New York City with the grand piano. And I was just the worst person you would have met. I was a hedonist. I was a decadent, selfish sycophant. I was emotionally bankrupt. I was morally bankrupt. I was spiritually bankrupt. I mean, my life was unrecognizable from this young kid who wanted to be a doctor and serve his mom and serve others. And what happened, really, I don't get to tell this story all the time, but one day, half my body just inexplicably went numb. And I remember, I don't think of it as inexplicable.

7:17Well, that's what my friend said, you know, for me, it was inexplicable, Simon, I was going to live forever. I mean, you know, I was on top of the world. I'm in the I'm in the DJ booth, spraying champagne down over the crowd. Okay, well, some Paris DJ flew in. So for me, it was inexplicable. And yeah, you're right. My club partner was like, bro, you know, no wonder your body's breaking down. I mean, I saw what you did last night. So I think what was so powerful for me was I was forced, I was faced with mortality almost instantly. You know, what if I have a brain tumor? Why can't I feel my arms and my legs?

7:53I remember putting my right arm under boiling hot water. I could see the steam coming up and I couldn't feel it. And I just thought, well, I'm going to die. And if I die, like, what are they going to, what are they going to say about me? What are they going to put on my tombstone? And the only thing I could come up with is, you know, here lies a club promoter who got a million people wasted. And that was my legacy, was getting people drunk. And okay, maybe he dated some pretty girls and he drove a car and he had a watch. And I think I just realized, oh my gosh, I am in the proverbial pigstead.

8:29I am kind of covered in feces. And I got to make a change. I got to do something. I got to try to find my way back. I got to find my way back home. And I remember going into the doctors and I got the MRIs and the brain scans and the CT scans and the EKGs and nobody could find anything physically wrong with me. There was no brain tumor. But, you know, for me, I think I maybe I over spiritualized it, but I thought it was a wake up call to assess my life. And, and, you know, what would be next? And I remember I started praying again. I remember starting to go back to church in New York City. The churches were meeting in these fluorescent lit cafeterias and the music was awful.

9:17I remember reading the Bible again and I came to this verse in James where it said, true religion is to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep yourself from being polluted by the world. I was like, I'm 0 for 2. I mean, I have done nothing for anyone in 10 years. And not only am I polluted, I'm actually polluting others for a living. And this led to, I guess, act three and being a pretty radical guy. I got this idea that I would tithe, which was this concept I'd grown up with in the church was to give 10%. And typically you tithe your money. I said, I'm going to tithe my time.

9:59I'm going to give one year of the 10 years that I have wasted, and I'm going to go see if I can be useful. Can I be useful to others? And my idea was simply to volunteer on some sort of humanitarian mission and see where that took me and see if any of my skills could be useful. I was all excited. I sell everything I own. I'm going to start life over at 28, and I apply to the Red Cross, and I apply to Save the Children, and Oxfam, and Doctors Without Bones. Borders and 10 organizations that I'd tangentially heard of. And I'm denied by all 10 organizations. You know, it turns out Doctors Without Borders is looking for actual doctors, not nightclub promoters for their mission.

10:42So I remember just being so deflated. You know, the hard part was me changing the intention of my life. Here I want to go and nobody will take me. And, you know, I think it was the 11th or the 12th organization wound up writing me back and said, Hey, Scott, if you're willing to pay us$500 a month, and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world at the time, which was Liberia, West Africa. And Simon, I could not have found Liberia on a map. I had never heard of Liberia before. And they said, well, we're going on a medical mission to Liberia. We're looking for a photojournalist.

11:20I had actually kind of part-time limped through New York University and gotten a degree in communications that I'd never used. So I dust that off and I say, I can take pictures and I can write. And they said, we'll take you on this mission for one year. And I mean, in some ways, it was the perfect opposite of my life. Go to the poorest country in the world, pay every single month for the pleasure of volunteering, and then see if I could be useful. and that really started act three at 28 years old and I was going to be living on a 522 foot hospital ship this was a 50 year old ship that used to sail and it had been gutted and turned into a state-of-the-art hospital but it was a really old ship and it was a simple idea this charity brought the best doctors and surgeons on their vacation time and sailed a hospital ship up and down the coast of Africa and just offered free medical care.

12:15So I went like all in, I surrendered my passport and they started billing me$500 a month. And that, that started a whole new journey. My third day there, Simon. So we, we would, the way that this worked is that the ship was going to be coming in 350 volunteer crew, 40 bed hospital, three operating theaters and a small team, an advanced team had flyered the whole country looking for sick people. And we would say on this day, sick people turn up and the doctors will triage you. And I remember when we came into the port, I learned that the government had given us the soccer stadium, the kind of decrepit football stadium in the center of the city to triage the patients.

13:01And I knew that we We had 1 ,500 available surgery slots to fill over the next eight months. And I remember getting up at five in the morning. It was still dark. I put on the hospital scrubs. I grabbed my two Nikon D1X digital cameras. This was the brand new era of digital cameras. And I jumped in this convoy of Land Rovers with the doctors and the nurses, and we snaked through the city. And as we get to the stadium, there are 5 ,000 sick people standing in the parking lot, waiting for us to open the door and offer 1 ,500 people access to surgery. And that was such a powerful, cathartic moment for me.

13:42I remember just weeping, realizing 3 ,500 sick people were going to be sent home without care. I later learned many of these people had walked for more than a month. They'd walked from other countries, from Sierra Leone, from Côte d 'Ivoire, from Guinea, just in the hope of seeing a doctor, some with their kids in tow. And we didn't have enough doctors. We didn't have enough resources. And that was so animating for me, I think, and just so opposite of my life of the previous 10 years. Can you share one story from the ship over that year that really captures the impact? well the first boy uh that i actually photographed was a 14 year old boy named alfred and if i'm describing him as i saw him he is this very thin west african child and he has a volleyball sized pink tumor occupying his mouth uh had a hard time breathing had a hard time eating.

14:47And his mom actually came in tow with a picture of her son four years previous at 10 years old. And he was, he looked like, like my 10 year old. He looked completely normal. And as she started to tell his story through a translator, she said, you know, this, this small lump started growing and then it got bigger and there was no surgeon to take her son to. And it just continued to grow and grow and grow and grow. And four years later, you know, at the front of the line, she was smart to bring him there a couple of days early so that he'd be seen. I'm face to face with this 14 year old child who is suffocating to death on his own face in front of me.

15:27And I've never seen anything like this before. And he was terrified and I was terrified. And I remember going in the corner and just kind of breaking down. Like, I don't know that I can do this. I've never seen suffering like this before. And, you know, knowing there were 1 ,499 people behind him, and my job was going to be to photograph everybody up close and personal for the medical library with their deformity, with their conditions. And one of the doctors came over and kind of kicked me in the butt. And he's like, kid, I thought you were from New York City. You know, they don't make them tougher than that in New York.

16:01You know, get back there. Go do your job. And hey, by the way, we're here to help this kid. You know, this kid's going to be fine. And I managed to get through those two days of screening, taking 1 ,500 people, seeing far worse than Alfred, people with missing faces, people who had been burned beyond recognition by rebel soldiers who poured oil on their faces, hoping to disfigure them. And then a couple days later, I did get to see Alfred's surgery. And I watched Dr. Gary meticulously remove the tumor, reconstruct his jaw, reconstruct his face. and I got to watch him heal on the ward. And then I remember asking, I said, hey, can I personally drive Alfred home to his village?

16:44It was a couple of hours away. I wanted to see the whole thing from beginning to middle to end. And I'll never forget, you know, jumping out of the Land Rover and I was rolling video and Alfred is just surrounded in his village by hundreds of people who had written this little boy off for dead. They thought he was cursed. He had done something, obviously, to offend the gods, right? That's why something was growing on his face. And just here he is, restored to health and restored to life. And it was just such a powerful, and that happened because these doctors had said yes, because they had come.

17:24Instead of going to the Maldives, which they certainly could have afforded as surgeons, they decided to go to Liberia for a month. So I saw a version of that story on repeat, you know, time and time again. I remember just one other short one. We did cataract surgeries. I remember meeting this woman. She was 25 years old, and she couldn't see. But she was born with sight. And these severe cataracts had developed over the last eight years or so. So she goes blind at 17. And she'd since gotten married and actually had a daughter. And she'd never seen her daughter. and I remember being in the operating theater, Simon thinking, Oh my gosh, I could do this cataract surgery.

18:05It was like 10 minutes. You know, I took a scalpel and he like cut the side of the eye and he stuck in some tweezers and he pulled out the cataract and he put a new lens in and like, that was it. I think it was like 10 or 15 minutes. And again, I wanted to be there to capture the moment when she could see again. So a couple of days later I have my camera and they remove the patch and she could see and she started screaming. She tackled me. She tackled the nurse. She's dancing and screaming. She could see her daughter. She could see her sister. And I just remember thinking, I mean, I think this costs$280.

18:44This is less than a bottle of vodka in a club. Yeah.

18:50It really makes us question our values, doesn't it? how can it not you finished the year scott what happens i just wanted more i just wanted more um i wanted i didn't want that to end i didn't want being around these people uh self sacrificing people stories miracles medical miracles um i didn't want it to end so i came back to new york that the ship took a couple months off where they would dry dock it and they would kind of, you know, outfit it for the next mission. And that second year for me was really more of the same, taking more patients home, watching their lives being transformed. I'd gotten exposed to so much, but I remember seeing in the second year, a child drank dirty water in a village.

19:38And this was a, you know, 10 year old, 13 year old, 13 year old girl, her name was Tawa. And she walked into this green, murky swamp that you could see the bugs. You could actually see insects in the swamp. And she just takes a drink from the swamp. And, you know, I'm talking to her and I realized this is the only water, this disgusting water that I wouldn't let my dog drink. The only water that she had ever experienced in her entire life. She drank this water. She bathed with this water. She washed her clothes with this water. She cooked with this water. And, you know, I remember just kind of being so shocked, like, oh my gosh, like she's drinking dirty water.

20:18And then I started to pull on that string and I went into more villages and I saw that so many of these villages didn't have clean water. They were drinking from a version of that dirty swamp. And I learned two very simple things, which kind of propelled me into, you know, the start of charity water. I learned that half of the country was drinking dirty water. So half of the country was drinking contaminated water every day. And then I learned, according to the World Health Organization, half of the disease in the country was because people were drinking dirty water and didn't have access to sanitation and hygiene.

20:52And I remember showing Dr. Gary my pictures from these remote villages as he was in scrubs and in the operating theater. And, you know, he kind of said, yeah, we know, we know. Why don't you go do something about it? Why don't you go? You give people clean water and eliminate half the diseases. Exactly. And I think I just, I did the math and I said, well, if these people had water, there wouldn't be 5 ,000 people standing in a parking lot. There'd be 2 ,500 people, maybe even less. And it was sort of that eureka moment, that discovery of, well, the root cause of so much of this sickness is something so basic.

21:34And then yet at the time, Simon, 1 billion people in the world, one out of six people alive, didn't have access to it. And so Gary, kind of my guide after two years, just says, kid, you're 30 years old. Sure, you could help us continue to fund expensive surgeries on the ship, or you could just go and get the whole world clean water. I was like, okay, I will just go get the whole world clean water. And that ended the time with Mercy Ships. And I came back to New York and I was completely broke. I was exactly 30. I had given all my money to Mercy Ships and the people that I'd met in Africa. And nightclub promoters are not good savers anyway or investors, right?

22:18So, you know, I really was starting from zero. And my old promoting friend took me in and let me live on his closet floor in Soho on Spring and Mercer in Manhattan. And that was really the start of Charity Water was this call from Dr. Gary. It was trying to do something about the two years and everything that I'd seen. And then trying to start an organization to actually bring clean water to a billion people. So let's just flash forward to current day. How old is Charity Water now? We're 17 years old. So you've been doing this for the past 17 years. How many wells have you built around the world?

22:58Over 150 ,000. 150 ,000 wells. You have top marks in Charity Navigator. And for very specific reason, because you developed a model, because you know the cynicism of where money goes in charities. And so much of it goes to overhead and so little of it goes to the cause. And an abysmally small amount of money that we give to these famous charities goes to the actual cause. What percentage a charity order of outside donated money goes directly to building wells? 100%. 100%. So, I mean, this, I think, you know, in the founding moment, I had the advantage of not knowing any better, Simon. I mean, I picked up HTML.

23:34I picked up HTML for dummies because I was going to have to build a website. And I picked up how to start a charity for dummies, you know, 501c3s for dummies. And what I did have the advantage, I think, as so many entrepreneurs or people who are just trying to solve problems in the world, is I was just talking to my friends and everyday people. And I realized everything you just said, there was a cynicism. There was a skepticism about charity. And I thought, well, you know, I would ask people, what would the perfect charity look like? What would, because everybody loved the issue, right? When I said, hey, I'm on a mission to bring clean water to everybody in the world.

24:09I mean, no one was saying wrong goal or dumb idea. You know, nobody was saying, let them drink bad water and die. But it was the construct people had a problem with. So I remember just saying, like, what would the perfect charity look like? and a lot of people just said, well, I'd know that all my money actually went to help people. Well, now that's actually impractical because the charity does have costs and you have to pay your team members and you have to take flights to develop programs and need an office if you're working out of an office and insurance and toner for the Epson copy machine, right?

24:40But I remember just thinking, well, what if I opened up a separate bank account and I got a very different group of people to pay the unsexiest overhead costs? What if I went to entrepreneurs, to people who had built businesses. And that would never be the public's problem. And so that's what it looked like. Not knowing any better, I opened up two separate bank accounts, the public bank account, which we called the water account, and then the overhead account. I think there was a couple hundred dollars in each and said never the two should meet. This is going to be church and state. And I remember having this idea that felt like a good idea then and I've regretted many times since.

25:19But I said, well, even get a payback credit card fees so that there's total integrity in the 100%. So if Simon goes on right now and he pulls out his Amex and he gives 100 bucks, sadly, we get 97. I said, we're going to go and raise that Amex transaction fee, that three bucks, and we'll put it back together with the 97. And we're going to send Simon's whole intended$100 of the field. That was great when you're not at scale. So that was kind of the first big pillar. And then the second thing just built on that, well, if money's not fungible, couldn't we build technology to actually track these donations and show people where they ended up couldn't we show simon that his hundred dollars ended up in this village in southern malawi and couldn't we show him the satellite image on google earth and google maps after that project was built so we started to kind of build this second pillar which turned out to be very unique to charity water, which was proof, closing the loop, showing people where their money went, where 100 % of their money went.

26:22So I need to double click on this. I need to underscore what you're doing here. Two bank accounts, a small group of wealthy individuals who commit to pay for your overhead so that every public donation, 100 % of public donation goes directly to the cause and you will follow that money and you will show somebody, you will give somebody the GPS coordinates. They can go on Google Earth and they can literally see a photograph of the exact well that their money bought. I mean, that's what we built. And that to me, it's so genius in its simplicity that it answers every cynicism question that people ask about charities.

27:08And it simply does the thing that nobody else has ever done, which is where does my money go? How do I know? I will say, sometimes charities spend too little on their operating costs, and they actually don't run great programs. We just said there's a group of people who we think we can inspire and get excited about paying those operating costs. So therefore, really, the disenfranchised, skeptical, cynical public at large can give in the purest way. And, you know, I mean, we take this really far, Simon. We've forced our auditors, KPMG, to write an opinion about the 100 % model every single year.