Scott Harrison: From Nightclub Promoter to Charity Water Founder

You guys were at school. She was 24/7. That's right. She was unpacking boxes from the move, you know, putting frames on the walls. Uh, dad was working, you know, long hours at a job. I was at school playing with my friends, uh, at their houses. And she was, she, she bore the brunt of it. And we, my dad and I actually got sick. So we had some weird food allergies, some migraines. But she got really sick and this led to the discovery of the gas leak. My dad ripped out the furnace with his bare hands. He threw it out on the curb. And from that point on, her immune system was irreparably disabled. And, uh, unfortunately I have 40 years of experience with the 3M family of masks. So my mom was always masked. From that point on. Charcoal masks, uh, N95 masks, everything chemical made her sick. So she was able to survive by creating isolation rooms for herself. Um, this sounds strange, but my mom lived in a tinfoil-covered bathroom and she slept on an army cot that had been washed in baking soda 20 times. She was so sensitive that if she wanted to read a book, I would have to either bake her book in the oven or set it outside for a couple days in the sun to get that smell of print out. Then I would knock on the door. I would hear the tinfoil rustle. I would hand her the lightly baked book and with her mask on and a pair of gloves, she would receive the book from me and shut the door. So all that to say, a very weird childhood, uh, in a caregiver role, doing the cooking, doing the cleaning., you know, helping my dad. My dad was an amazing, loyal man, stuck by her, uh, believed that one day God would make sense of all this. And, you know, my mom just lived with this for the rest of her life. So, you know, the first kind of chapter of my life, if you'd run into me as a young teenager, I was gonna be a doctor. I was gonna cure mom and everybody else sick with a condition like hers. Uh, instead I became a schemer and a dreamer, and at 18, you Yeah, I moved to New York City and just had that wake up moment. Now it's my turn. Now it's my turn to break the rules. I don't want to take care of anyone anymore. I want to take care of myself and I want to have sex and I want to do drugs and I want to drink and I want to be rich and famous. And I stumbled into this job as a New York City nightclub promoter where you had a pretty good shot at achieving those markers of success. And I, I became really good at throwing parties, uh, at the high end, selling $1,000 bottles of Cristal, selling $25 vodka Red Bulls that cost us 25 cents and creating spaces for movie stars and actors and musicians and, you know, fashion moguls and designers to party. And you know, it couldn't have been more opposite maybe from the, the slightly repressed Christian upbringing. And, you know, a picture of my life 10 years later was me in a DJ booth with a famous DJ. I'm spraying champagne down over the crowd. Puffy's at table 1, Jay-Z's at table 3, and I'm at table 2 thinking I'm a rock star because we have prettier girls at our table than Jay-Z or Puffy. And, and this was, you know, it was dinner at 10, the nightclub at 12, and then after hours at 5:00 AM and to bed at noon, taking Ambien to come down with a whole lot of self-loathing. You know, if it, if it caught up to us, which it, it did, you know, far too often towards the end of that. So, uh, it was 10 years for me to realize that I had made a mess of my life. I had come so far from the spirituality, from the morality that my parents had tried to instill in me, so far from wanting to become a doctor to help others. And one day, half my body went numb. And, uh, you know, maybe no surprise to anybody listening as I just described what I was doing, but I just remember thinking like, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. I've been living like I'm gonna live forever and now I'm gonna die in a week. I've got some brain tumor. I've got something very wrong with me. 'cause I can't feel half my body. And I went to doctors and had MRIs and CT scans and, you know, they hooked diodes up to me and electromagnetic pulsing, all that. They couldn't figure out anything wrong with me. Uh, but it was a wake-up call, Sean, that if I did die, my tombstone, the best it could read would be, here lies a man who's gotten a million people wasted. It was the only thing I had to show for my career.

I remember being brutally honest. Yeah. Right. Because I think everybody kind of cheats a little, like how many alcoholic drinks, right? You shave that by half typically. I think I was honest. I'm like, how many alcoholic drinks? Like 165 a week. You know, something just, yeah. How many packs of cigarettes? 2.5 a day. You know, anyway, they couldn't find anything wrong with me, but this led to, you know, a pretty radical life change and maybe the close of chapter 2. As this sycophantic, hedonistic nightclub promoter living only for himself. And I wondered whether I could start life over at 28 and really asked myself, what would the opposite of my life look like? You know, I realized a pivot was not in order. You know, this was, this was not a small course correction that needed to happen. This was like, do and think and say the 180-degree opposite of everything you've done and thought and said for the last 10 years and see how that plays out.

Yeah. Well, there was a faith piece. So I started praying again and, you know, kind of going back and like, hey, what do I believe? Any of that stuff from childhood? You know, there was a lot of religion. There was a lot of rules, you know, but, but there was a lot of good in there as well. So I sort of, you know, try to kind of come back to faith again. So there was a lot of prayer, like You know, God, are you there? Uh, and what should I be doing? And is there, is there anything else for me? And I remember the self-talk, uh, really saying, okay, well, if you're, if you're exploring the opposite of your life, um, what would that look like? And I thought, well, it would be volunteering on a humanitarian mission in the poorest country in the world. That was the spec. That would be the opposite of a nightclub, you know, bottles and models. Lifestyle. And I remember from a, I, I was, I'd taken some time driving just aimlessly north trying to, you know, find myself. I wound up in Maine in an internet cafe on Moosehead Lake, uh, with dial-up Dell computers. And I started applying to humanitarian aid organizations that I'd tangentially heard of over the decade. Certainly not that I had given any money to. But Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision, the Red Cross. And I, I was very clear that this is what I wanted to do. Give 1 year of the 10 years that I had selfishly wasted or lived and see if I could be useful. Well, maybe no surprise, I was denied by the first 10 organizations. You know, it turns out that the Red Cross is not looking for a nightclub promoter. Doctors Without Borders are, they're looking for credible doctors, not, you know, DJs or, or promoters. So I remember being so, uh, dejected by the rejections. And then one organization wrote me back and said, if you are willing to pay us $500 a month to volunteer, and if you're willing to go live in the poorest country in the world, a country I'd never even heard of called Liberia, uh, and it was at the bottom of the United Nations development chart because it had just come out of a 14-year civil war. And there was finally data on the country that they could stack rank it at the bottom of the world. And they said, we are taking a medical mission into this country and we'll take you if you pay us every month. And, uh, the, the job or the, the volunteer role I signed up for was a photojournalist. So I was gonna be taking pictures and writing, and I was always a pretty good writer and a pretty good hobby photographer, you know, through the club, club years. And I'd gotten a, degree part-time at NYU for that because it was, it was the easiest degree.

And then a couple things happened. Yeah, that, that's exactly right. I wouldn't have told you more than a year of line of sight. Um, I met the chief medical officer, so I was gonna be living on a hospital ship, a 500 foot converted ocean liner that was 50-plus years old. So not, you know, not a nice cruise liner. Um, and it had been gutted and turned into a state-of-the-art hospital with a very simple idea for this charity. Let's sail a giant hospital ship with the best doctors in the world on their vacation time, and let's take it to people who can't afford medical care. And, and because we can control the environment, let's bring them on the hospital ship, perform these life-changing surgeries, and then set them you know, back on land with transformed lives and transformed health. So I met the guy who was running this whole thing and his name was Dr. Gary Parker. And I learned that he was a plastic surgeon from California who had heard about this opportunity and he signed up for 3 months. And when I walked up the gangway of this hospital ship to, to surrender my passport, he had been there 21 years. So he never went back to his California plastic surgery. Practice, and he dedicated two decades of his life to this work. So I remember just thinking, what if that's me? What if it's not a year? And I wanted to know everything I could about him and what two decades of service would look like or feel like, or the impact that a person could have. So my third day there, um, is the patient screening. So the, the ship's arrival has been announced. By an advanced team, flyers have been posted throughout the country, and we have been given the football stadium in the center of town, the, the soccer stadium by the government to triage the people who might come to visit our doctors. Now I know we have 1,500 available surgery slots to fill. I remember thinking to myself like, are there 1,500 sick people with facial tumors or cleft lips or blind or lame?, with leprosy. Like, you know, that sounds like a lot of people. And I remember at 5:15 or 5:30 AM putting on hospital scrubs. It was still pitch black out, jumping into this convoy of Land Rovers with doctors and surgeons and nurses. And we kind of snaked through the city and we came to the stadium and there were 5,000 people standing in the dark in the parking lot waiting for us to open the doors.. And that was such a powerful moment for me realizing, oh crap, we're gonna send 3,500 of these people home without seeing a doctor, without any answer for their affliction.

Now the, the parallels, you know, there, there have been some interesting ones. I later learned some of these people had walked for more than a month with their children from neighboring countries, just hoping that a doctor might save their child's life. Wow. So I remember Dr. Gary, uh, said to me, focus on the hope. You know, don't focus on the 3,500 people we're gonna send home. Focus on the 1,500 people who we're gonna help. And that's what I really did for that first year on the ship. And I was documenting every single one of them before surgery, and after surgery for the medical library. And that, you know, Mercy Ships would be able to use those photos to raise money and spread awareness of the work. The other cool thing that happened was I was blasting my club list of 15,000 emails with pictures of facial tumors and flesh-eating disease and leprosy, you know, being healed and, you know, or, or patients being operated on., and you know, back then email open rates were like 100%, so there were definitely a lot of unsubscribes. You know, I signed up for that cool Prada party you threw once, but not like the tumor party. Um, but then, you know, most people were intrigued. They were fascinated. I had no idea that there were doctors on a ship saving people's lives. How do I get a piece of this? How do I sponsor a surgery? How do I come on the ship like you? I remember somebody writing me from Chanel once. She's like, I sit here in a brightly lit cosmetic headquarters and I'm weeping, you know, because I want more. Like, I want more than to sell makeup every day. I want more for my life. I want more purpose. So I, I learned that maybe the same gift, uh, of promoting, getting people to stand outside a velvet rope. To queue to hope to get into a nightclub, telling the story that if you came in my club and you spent thousands of dollars and you left with a cute boy or a cute girl, then your life had meaning. You know, that same maybe gift or skill of, of promoting could be used to promote something entirely different and redemptive and important for other people. So the year ended and I just signed up for a second year. 'cause I didn't know what was next. I said, well, let me go do this again for another year. And that was when I found water. So the second year I got off of the ship, I spent more and more time. I, I bought a motorcycle. Uh, so I'm driving around West Africa, Liberia, you know, with 14,000 United Nations peacekeepers and soldiers. And I've got this little press badge and I'm spending time in these rural areas and I see the water people are drinking. And they're drinking from swamps and ponds and rivers. Brown, green, viscous water. And I learned two things. I learned half the country is drinking dirty water, and I learned half the disease in the country is because people are drinking dirty water. So, you know, for contrast, you know, a year previously I'd been selling Voss water for $10 a bottle. To people who would just order 20 bottles for the table and not open any of them because they were drinking vodka or champagne. So there was just something so, you know, profoundly, uh, contrastful of watching a human drink dirty water that was making them sick in real time and knowing the excess of my former life. And I remember showing these photos to Dr. Gary and I'm like, Dr. Gary, no wonder 5,000 sick people are standing outside a parking lot of a stadium. You should see what they're drinking. And he said, yeah, I know. And in fact, a billion people drink this water every day. 1 in 6 people alive on the planet. He said, why don't you go do something about it? Why don't you make this your mission? Instead of raising money for, you know, the next 1,500 surgeries on this ship, why don't you just go get everybody in the world clean water? He said, yeah, something like, you'll be the, you'd be the greatest medical professional in the, the history of the world if you just brought people the most basic need for health, the most basic need for life. And I was 30 at the time and I'm like, well, okay, Dr. Gary, that sounds good. You know? And I came back to New York City and said, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna try to bring clean and safe drinking water to every single human on earth before I die. 'Cause that seems like a good idea., and it'd be great if 5,000 people didn't have to stand outside a stadium, if 3,500 people didn't have to get turned away because they had clean water in their villages. And that was really the start of Charity: Water, you know, now 17 years ago.

I think what helped was that I had lived there for almost a year. You know, you hear about a lot of people that go on a mission trip with their church and they spend 5 days in Guatemala or in Africa. 5 days is not enough to change Right. You change everything about your life for, for most people. Um, a year of immersive proximity to an issue was, so there was a responsibility to do something about what I'd seen that, that took more than a week or even a month. Right. Um, so I, I remember coming home, um, in fact, the ship was sailing to South Africa while it was gonna be dry docked every year, so they would kind of make repairs on the ship and everybody went on vacation to wine region for a month. I'm like, I don't wanna waste my time doing that. I'm gonna go back to New York City and I'm gonna put on a gallery exhibition of all the photos that I've taken and I'm gonna invite all my club friends in and I'm gonna ask 'em for money. And I did that. I got a gallery donated in Chelsea. Uh, I got a bunch of, you know, uh, printers to donate, you know, high-res giant photographs and I put together 108. Of my before and afters in a gallery. And I invited everybody from the clubs to come in and we raised about $100,000. And then I went back on the ship to show people what we had done with their money. Right. Uh, to kind of follow the donation.

We're in year 17, just started year 17. We've raised $750 million and we've helped, uh, 16.8 million people get clean water.

Yeah, but toothpaste. This was Nick Kristof of the New York Times. Toothpaste. Is peddled with far more sophistication than all the world's life-saving causes.

I didn't come from the established, so I knew nothing about traditional philanthropy. How to set up a charity, actually went and bought the yellow dummies book, you know, nonprofits for dummies. Okay. And then I bought HTML for dummies. 'Cause I'm like, well, I don't have money for a web designer, so I need to also, you know, build our website. So I was living on a closet floor at the time in SoHo, New York. My old club partner took me in for free rent and I was sleeping on his walk-in closet. And, but I had a very clear mission. So if you'd run into me 17 years ago, I'm gonna bring clean water to everybody in the world. Same thing I'm, I'm saying, you know, now. Um, the, as I talked to everyday people who worked at MTV or VH1 at the time, who worked at Sephora, who worked at Chase Bank, I realized they were cynical and skeptical about charities. They just didn't trust charities writ large. And I remember coming across a USA Today poll found 42% of Americans just flat out said distrustful of charities. 70% of Americans in a more recent poll said they believe charities waste their money. So 7 out of 10 potentially generous people think charities are wasting their donations. So I thought this was a huge opportunity, uh, and a new business model could solve some of this, uh, Skepticism or speak to the skeptic. So I thought, well, what if we could open up two separate bank accounts and in one bank account I would raise all of that nasty overhead, the staff salaries, the office costs, the toner for the Epson copy machine, the flights to Africa and India and Asia and where we'd eventually build our projects. What if I could raise that in a separate bank account and then in the main bank account, 100%. Of every donation, whether it was a dollar or a pound or a euro or a million dollars or a million pounds or a million euros could go directly to Build Water projects that saves people's lives. And, you know, nobody was doing this at the time. I mean, this would've, you know, made us different than 99.99% of charities in the world. Um, because it's very difficult to do, but I just thought this would be clear. I could say to a 6-year-old, go sell lemonade. Turn in 75 cents and all 75 cents will go directly to help people get clean water. So that was kind of number one idea. Number two was then kind of realizing, wow, money's not fungible. So we can build technology tools to track these small amounts of money down to the project that they funded. And I remember meeting the, the founder of Google Earth and he pressed this medallion into my palm. So Charity: Water started right before Google Earth and Google Maps. And he says, you know, I'm building a place where you can put every single well, every water point, and you can show people where their money went. So I'm like, great, we're gonna be the first charity to geolocate every completed project and we're gonna build the most transparent charity the world has ever seen. So proof became the second pillar. And then the third thing was this idea of building an epic brand. Uh, charities so often use shame and guilt to peddle their wares. Where would the Apple of charities, where was the Nike? You know, Nike doesn't sell shoes by telling people they're fat and lazy. You know, Nike sells shoes by telling inspirational stories of people overcoming adversity. And Nike believes if you have one leg, you can win a marathon. You know, if you have one arm, you can win the shot put competition at the Olympics. With your other arm. And, you know, Nike believes greatness is inside you, and that's the way that they market. And someone's like, maybe I should turn off the TV and stop eating Cheetos and try and go run a quarter of a mile. So I, I wanted Charity:water to be modeled on, you know, the whimsy of Virgin, the kind of beautiful design of Apple, and then this, you know, this opportunity or inspiration of, of Nike. And I just didn't see it out there. So brand was kind of the third thing. The third pillar. And then to actually get the work done, I believed, you know, as we built wells and built gravity-fed systems and filtration systems, and it would need to be led by the locals in each of these countries to be culturally appropriate and sustainable. Um, when you came with me to Ethiopia, there were 350 local staff working on the charity:water projects, running 8 different drilling rigs. There wasn't a single person who look like you or me, uh, in that entire program of 350 people. And we just believed that we would create thousands of local jobs as we scaled. Um, and our, our role would be to get people to care about this issue, get people to say, it's not okay on my watch that we are looking for water on a planet over 100 million miles away and 770 million people are risking their life every day because they don't have clean water here on our planet. So our job would be to get people to reject the apathy that, you know, is, is easy to assume with any of these paralyzing global issues and say, let's do something about this. Let's get everybody on earth clean water. Like we can all agree on that. Republicans can agree on that. Democrats and independents and libertarians and Jews and Christians and Muslims and atheists and Mormons. Like everybody can think that clean drinking water is a good idea. So it started in a nightclub. I mean, the only idea I had 17 years ago was to throw my 31st birthday party. I got the club donated, I got open bar donated, and then I charged everybody $20 to get in as a donation. And at the end of that night, we collected $15,000 in this big plexi box and we counted it and then we counted it again and then we photographed everybody counting it. And then we took 100% of the money to Uganda and we built our first well., and then we sent the photos and the GPS coordinates of that well back to the 700 people. And we say, you did this. Here's where your $20 went. And that sounds so simple, but that was so revolutionary. People never expected to hear from the charity again. I mean, they went to some party in a club for some dude's 31st birthday and they threw $20 in a bin. And that idea, we said, let's just put that at the core of Charity: Water and in everything we do, let's try to connect people to what their money accomplished, to the people who they helped.

And so you, you kick it off like that with the nightclub. Go back, you go back to the, to, to your kind of roots as, as far as what do I know how to do? Okay, I can throw a great party, but this time I'll, I'll, I'll do it with a twist. And then tell the story about Mark Zuckerberg and, uh, Michael Birch and trying to, uh, scale this up. 'Cause I thought this was an amazing story. Yeah. And this is where at some point your, your genius business model of not keeping all the overhead separate and letting all the donations, 100% of the donations, go to the cause sounds good in theory, but there's a reason why charities don't do this. Yeah, because it's hard to cover the overheads. So talk about how you got into a little bit of a pickle and then what happened from there.

Yeah, so about a year and a half in, well, let's just say the 100% model was working and we'd raised a few million dollars just Right outta the gate. People love that idea. In the other bank account, a lot harder to raise that overhead. So we had a moment where we had $887,000 ready to go out to build water projects, and we were about to miss payroll on the overhead bank account. And it was interesting, the advice I was getting from people was, hey, go borrow from that $887,000, right? I mean, you gotta pay your people, right? Like, you'll pay it back later. Write a little IOU in that account.. And I remember thinking, if we borrow one penny, we've compromised our integrity. There's a crack at the foundation and I don't wanna work here and nobody will wanna work here again. So I'm just gonna shut the charity down and say that this business model didn't work. And I started calling lawyers to say, like, how do you wind down a charity 18 months in? Because all the naysayers were right. It's too hard getting people excited about overhead. At the same time, um, I had just come up with this idea of trying to scale the birthday party, but not a birthday party in a nightclub, taking it online. And, uh, for year 2, uh, or the, the, the 1-year anniversary of Charity:water, I donated my 32nd birthday and instead of throwing a party, I just asked everyone to give $32 for my 32nd birthday. And I wound up raising 60 grand. 4x because a lot of people had $32 to give, especially if they could see exactly where it went. Right. So I had, uh, Googled, you know, top 3 social networks and, you know, MySpace was number 1 at the time. So I emailed Tom, uh, Facebook was number 2, emailed Zuck, uh, a site called Bebo that I hadn't heard of was number 3. So I remember scraping, uh, Michael Birch's name from the domain registry, you know, whois.net, and I emailed him and I said, hey, I'm this kid. I'm trying to bring clean water to the world. I'd like everybody on your social network to donate their birthdays to my cause. It's your age in dollars. 100% goes, you know, this is a great idea. Well, Duck didn't write me back. Tom didn't write me back. Michael did. And he said, I actually love this idea. And on the side, I have this site called Birthday Alarm, which reminds people of their birthdays. And, um, he said, you know, the timing for me is terrible right now, but, you know, keep up the great work. And by the way, the website design looks awesome. So this was 6 months before the bankruptcy moment. And around this time when we're about to wind down, you know, I remember praying, I'm like on my knees like, God, I thought you gave me this dream. You know, where's the money? Like, show me the money. Uh, you, you know, you show me the money in the wrong bank account. And, uh, I, I was praying. I had no faith, uh, that anything would happen. And at this time, Michael Birchtine turns up and he says, hey, I'm gonna be in New York. Um, I've got an hour, you know, can I stop by and, and see your office? And I remember sitting with him and taking him through a presentation on my laptop and just being really honest about how hard it was to raise money for overhead. And I remember thinking he just didn't like me. I mean, he was British, you know, he wasn't smiling. Not, not a lot of warmth, uh, or encouragement. But 2 days later, he emails me at midnight and he says, hey, I really enjoyed meeting you. I just wired $1 million into your overhead account. And I remember logging on to the bank. And I saw it, 1,000. It was 13 months of overhead funding. So we went from insolvent and he said, I think he said, keep rocking. Just, you just need more time. Love the idea. You just need more time. And again, that was $750 million ago. And today we have 131 entrepreneurs and, and families that pay all the overhead. And we have never been close to the line since. Uh, and, and, you know, we grow that group by selecting 20 new entrepreneurs and 20 new families or so every single year as the organization grows. And, you know, Michael and Zocchi have been very generous. They've given over $20 million. They've come and come to 14 or 15 countries with me now, bringing their kids all over the world to see the impact that they've, they've made. But that was, that was, that was a moment.

And I think last year was— it's $40 to give one person clean water on average. We work across 22 countries. I think last year's actual was $39.67.

Yeah, I mean, we've, you know, innovation has been a real core of the organization, as you say, trying new things. We made one of the first virtual reality films 7 years ago. This is before they had VR cameras that you could buy. We got GoPros donated, made a modified rig, and shot a 6-day journey where a 13-year-old girl gets clean water for the first time in her life. Uh, we debuted that at a gala where we put headsets on 400 people in black tie. We press play in synchronicity. We took them all to Ethiopia for this week of, you know, water magic. And then the minute the film ended, we just asked them for money. And raised a couple million dollars. So, you know, that, that was a fun one. A couple years ago we got into the Bitcoin space and we started a trust called the Bitcoin Water Trust where we raised 100 Bitcoin to start and we said, we're going to lock them all up in cold storage until at least 2025. So we're not going to sell it. Charity Water, charities typically when you give them stock, you know, they immediately liquidate. Who are we to ever take a position on any asset?, right? Right. And we said, we're going to take a position on this. And we think, you know, there will be people who would only give us a Bitcoin donation, you know, to hold past, you know, the next halving and maybe even longer, but would never give us a Bitcoin, you know, to immediately liquidate. They'd rather give us cash or some other asset. So we raised over $100,000 there, and that's, that campaign is open, is still going with that same promise that 100%. Will then, you know, get unlocked at some point 2025 and beyond, and then go to have as much impact as, as possible. Gosh, I mean, we, you know, the birthday idea raised over $100 million by getting over a million people involved just in that simple idea. And that's now been taken by lots of other charities.

Yeah, so that's another way people can get, and then we have, um, we have an amazing subscription community called The Spring, um, which is, that has really helped the organization triple over the last, uh, 5 years. And it's, I remember being in a Land Rover with Daniel Ek from Spotify and he's like, Scott, your business model sucks. Every January 1st, all that money you raised last year, Your ticker starts at zero. You gotta go re-raise all that and then grow. He said, why don't you build a community of people who will sign up every single month to give what they can? And that's The Spring. Um, that now has members from 149 countries and is really the core of so much of our growth. The average is about $30 a month, so it's, it's a little less than one person getting clean water, but there are a lot of people that can give one person clean water every single month and not even miss it, not even think about it. You know, it's two Netflixes and a Spotify, right? Or two HBO Maxes. And, uh, and instead of, you know, getting content that you probably don't even need to watch more of anyway, you know, humans are getting clean water as 100% of that goes. So that's, people could learn more about that at thespring.com. And there's also a video there that's gotten over 100 million views, which is a short telling of our story with some of the visuals that you mentioned.