Mission started with thirst for change
Founder of charity: water finds calling in Liberia
Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Scott Harrison was in his late 20s, living and partying in New York City as a nightclub promoter, when he came to the halting realization that he was creating “perhaps the most meaningless legacy a person could leave.” He sold his things, packed his bags and moved to Liberia on a humanitarian mission, discovering a world in which people drank from muddy swamps and hiked miles for water. His mission became charity: water, a non-profit organization that has since brought clean water to millions of people in developing countries.
USA TODAY caught up with Harrison – whose book, “Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World,” went out on bookstore shelves Oct. 2 – to talk about everything from world travel and nightclub promotion to the awe of hearing President Barack Obama tell his story and the painful low of realizing the turmoil that dirty water can cause.
Question: Who has been your biggest mentor?
Harrison: This guy named Ross Garber. I worked with him for maybe four or five years – he was the founder of an internet startup in Austin called Vignette that did very well. Our relationship started with him as a disgruntled customer. He had donated his birthday (proceeds) to charity: water, and he thought our web product experience was so bad that he wrote a 10-point scathing email to his friend, who then forwarded it on to me. I’m like, “This is amazing.” I crave negative feedback. So, I wrote him and said, “Hey, can we get on the phone? I think I actually agree with eight of your 10 points, but I’d love to hear a little more.” It developed into a really constructive, dynamic relationship.
Q: What does your career path look like?
Harrison: Not traditional. I started out as a club promoter in New York City, which was really an act of rebellion against a conservative Christian upbringing. I spent 10 years really getting drunk, getting other people drunk, working at 40 different nightclubs, and picking up every vice that you might imagine would come with the territory. At 28, I came to the realization that I was spiritually bankrupt, I was morally bankrupt, I was leaving perhaps the most meaningless legacy a person could leave. That realization led me to trying to find my way back to a lost faith and spirituality, trying to find my way back to virtue and morality. I sold almost everything I owned, all of my earthly possessions, and asked myself: What would the exact opposite of my life look like? The only thing I could think of was to go serve the poor in the poorest country in the world, give one of the 10 years that I had so selfishly wasted back in service to others and to quit all of my vices.
That led me on a humanitarian mission as a photojournalist to Liberia, a country that just emerged from a 14year civil war. I joined a medical mission and saw extreme poverty for the first time. One year turned into two years, and the thing that struck me the most – the one thing that just wasn’t OK on my watch – was that people were drinking dirty water. I think it was in stark contrast to my former life, where I sold bottles of water at nightclubs for $10. That led me to really want to work on water and want to bring clean drinking water to everyone alive, and then that led me to charity: water.
Q: What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned?
Harrison: Put integrity at the core of everything you do. Much more important than what you do is how you do it.
Q: Do you remember a pivotal moment in which you realized that this was what you were meant to do?
Harrison: I think it was really day one of charity: water, when the whole thing came together. I threw a party, invited 700 people to come to my 31st birthday party, and asked them all to donate $20 on the way in. We raised $15,000 that night, and we took 100 percent of the money to a refugee camp in northern Uganda where 31,638 people were living, drinking unsafe water. We built our first water project, and then we sent the photos and the GPS coordinates and the water flowing back to those 700 people, and the response that I got just let me know that I was really on the right path. People were just so surprised that a charity would bother to tell them where $20 went, and that something transformative had happened along the way.
Q: What has been your biggest career high and low?
High: I was invited to the National Prayer Breakfast with my wife and I was sitting there at one of the tables, paying attention as President Obama was giving his speech. Then, in the middle of his speech, he starts telling my story, and I just couldn’t believe it. I had actually never met President Obama, and here he is, spending minutes of his speech telling my story. My wife gripped my hand like she was going to break it, and it was a really humbling moment, to hear him talking about my life and about charity: water in such an honoring way.
Low: Living in a village in Ethiopia where a 13-year-old girl hung herself after she had spilled her water. She had been walking eight hours a day with a clay pot on her back, and one day after a long journey she slipped and fell, and she broke her pot and she watched all of the water that she had spent a day walking for just spill out into the sand, and she just didn’t want to go walk for water anymore. She took a noose and tied it around her neck and she climbed a tree and she jumped. I lived in this village for a week. I met her mom, and her family, and I went to her grave and I walked in her footsteps, and then I stood next to the tree, which for me was just this really shocking moment of just realizing the injustice, the travesty.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?
Harrison: I would say to go deep. Find that one thing that they can be passionate about for a long time and then go deep, and immerse themselves in understanding the problem and then the solutions.