You’re the Founder and CEO of Thirst Project, but let’s start from the beginning, if that’s okay. You’re originally from Indianapolis, but moved to Los Angeles to study Acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Growing up, did you always want to become an actor?

Growing up, I had a pretty singular focus on entertainment. I was this hyper-active kid who always loved being on stage and telling stories. When I was pretty young, around seven years old, my mom took me to my first audition. I started doing theater in and around the Midwest, and I sort of found myself insatiably connected to trying to tell other people’s stories, and it made me feel alive. That really drove a lot of my childhood. I traveled with different performing groups across Europe and did a lot of stuff in Indiana and Chicago. When I graduated high school, I had done some terrible local commercials and things like that, so I decided to move to Los Angeles like everyone else out here and pursue entertainment. At that point in my life, I was arguably the most selfish, kind of introspectively-focused human on the planet. I really didn’t care about too much else unless it directly had to do with my career and what I was pursuing. It was while I was here that I met a friend who was a photojournalist, who was the first person to really expose me to the global water crisis. It was then, in 2008, that my worldview kind of shifted.

Wow. I think maybe some people wouldn’t have done much beyond talking about it, donating. You went all-in at the grassroots level: you and a few friends bought water bottles and tried to educate others and raise awareness. What motivated you to take the route of hitting the streets to start conversations, and what was that experience like?

I think it was two things. One, I was poor, so I didn’t really have a check to write. But I think the other was that I was struck by how massive the water crisis was.

I was like, “Man, how is it that this issue is so huge and it’s not a part of daily dialogue?” When you’re nineteen and precocious and passionate about something, you just talk to your friends. You talk to the people you know. So I went to school and just started talking to my friends. Like, “Guys, you have no idea what’s going on in the world. We’ve got to do something about this.” We just started raising awareness around our school, around town here in Los Angeles. We didn’t just set out immediately to start an organization; we really were just a bunch of college students trying to get other people in our city to talk about this issue and consider doing something about it. One of the first things that we did was go out to Hollywood Boulevard because it was, you know, a super densely populated area that had lots of foot traffic, and we gave away free water bottles that we had all pitched in to buy to get people to talk to us and ask, “Why are you doing this?” Then we could say to them, “Did you know this is happening? Did you know that there are over a billion people, at that point, in our world who didn’t have safe water?” 

On that day, we met two other people our age who were in school, who said, “Hey, would you guys come to our schools and tell our friends what you told us? We want to see if we can do something similar.” That prompted us to say, “Okay, sure.” We got together and went and spoke at those schools, and in about a month, those first two schools had done fundraisers and they sent checks to us, made out to the Thirst Project, which was what we were calling our school club that we had started about this issue. That was when we realized, “Man, if this is what two schools could do, what if there were a hundred? What if there were a thousand?” We realized there was tremendous untapped potential in students and people our age around this issue. We created the organization. It wasn’t like we woke up and said, “Hey, we’re going to start a charity today.” It was a very responsive, evolutionary process.

Over ten years later, education is better than it used to be, but it’s still not where it should be. Flint is a local example, and at the same time, it’s a global issue. Why is there this educational disconnect over something so basic and fundamentally necessary? 

“In the world we live in, everyone has their own list of things that they have to do. There’s all of these responsibilities or things that we have to accomplish or be made aware of. I think it’s just easy for important-but-not-necessarily-urgent-to-people’s-lives issues to fall by the wayside. I think that’s what happens. I think because it’s something that doesn’t necessarily have an immediate effect on people’s day to day lives and responsibilities, it becomes an issue that doesn’t necessarily make its way to the forefront of conversations. That doesn’t mean that it’s right; it’s just the reality.”

It’s absolutely sure not right, but even just understanding the root of that predicament is something worth recognizing and exploring, as well. You mentioned that when you started, it was an evolutionary, organic process in that people wrote checks to the Thirst Project before you saw it as what it would come to be over the past decade, so to speak. Did you guys decide to keep going and forge your own path, or did you choose to outsource or collaborate with other foundations or companies that maybe had a little bit of infrastructure already in place?

At the beginning, we did. We were exclusively a funding organization for probably the first two years of our existence - that is to say, we would raise money and we would donate it to other NGOs or non-profits on the ground in different countries that were working to build water and sanitation and hygiene projects. The reason we eventually shifted was really two-fold: one, we were getting bigger and had the scale and capacity to really decide how and where we would make our own impact…  in particular, significant measurable impact in one area. The other reason was that we started realizing there were some pretty significant differences in the ways that people would build and implement water projects – country to country, community to community, and organization to organization.

“Candidly, at the beginning, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we began asking.”

We asked things like, “Well, why is it that you guys elect water committees made up of 50% women and 50% men who are trained on maintenance and repair and sanitation and hygiene, but maybe you guys don’t? And why is it that this other group may do hydrology or groundwater surveys before they drill to determine the best location in a community to drill, but you guys don’t?” We kind of pushed pause for about a year on funding projects while we assembled what would come to be known as our Water Project Technical Board. It’s a group of civil engineers and hydrologists who are PhDs in their respective fields, but who ultimately either work for or own their own for-profit, typically green civil engineering groups. They’re the ones who architected our standards for sustainability, so they outlined how we would build projects in the field, how we would go about selecting and hiring the for-profit drilling companies we work with, and interfacing with community members. From there, they hired our staff on the ground in each of the countries that we work in, and architected those plans. But at the beginning, we did collaborate with lots of other NGOs, and we still do collaborate with lots of other groups, but the dynamic of that collaboration is not one where we fund other groups. In fact, many times we are sort of the implementing partner for groups that are building projects. For example, if someone is building a school, a hospital, or a neighborhood care point where they need water, they might come to us and say, “Hey, we’re doing this thing here,” and we would come in and support them in the way that we work.

Something that’s really impressed me in particular is how you’ve learned as you go. The water crisis and all related aspects are so intricate, multi-level, and detailed. It’s not all common vernacular. Hearing you talk about what the Water Project Technical Board is responsible for, and how their backgrounds come into play, I sort of picture a spider web, if that makes sense. Going from entertainment to building a non-profit from the ground up, what was it like learning on the job, and starting from square one?

“It’s been the case from day one that I’ve been acutely aware of the reality that on paper, I really have no business doing what I do. Because of that, I’ve been very aware of the many, many things that I may or may not be good at. I have done the one thing I do really well, which is tell a good story; then, I find people who are great at those other things and convince them to come around the table and use their skills or resources to help us build out the projects and programs.”

I think to that end, I’ve learned a tremendous amount in the last decade about water and sanitation and hygiene and the field and developing world. I’ve learned a great deal about running a business and running an organization that I didn’t necessarily go to school for, but thankfully, I’ve been able to sit under the guidance and direction of some of the most brilliant business leaders in the world who sit on our board and give very generously of their time and resources to help really guide and steward where we go.

I love that you see it as collaboration rather than delegation, whereas some people have a difficult time letting go of something they’ve so intricately built and devoted all of their time to. That’s a really interesting perspective that you’ve just shared with me, so thank you for that. 

For sure.

And on the topic of board members and donors, it’s clear that they don’t just feel like they’re donating. You’ve built and fostered a community and environment where people feel personally involved, connected, and integral to the mission. What’s that process like, as far as bringing those people on board to donate and get involved?

Our donor pools are fairly diverse and fairly different. They really kind of fall, generously speaking, into one of two primary buckets. One being, for the ease of conversation, we’ll just say “old people money,” and the other, “student money,” or “young people money.”

“We’re unapologetically a youth organization.”

As a youth organization, we focus on everything from who we hire as speakers to speak at the tour, to where we actually send our school tour across the country which, this year, the tour will go to about eight hundred high school and college campuses – about a hundred and fifty thousand students will sit in the assembly and learn about the water crisis. When we think about that – from who we hire to be the speakers to the actual content on the tour, from the videos that we create to all of the media that we deliver – all of those [things] are created through the lens of what will best meet a student where they’re at and best activate them. And then on the back end, the team members who are staffers here work with those students at those schools to help them figure out what kinds of goals they should set for fundraising and appropriately match them to the best types of strategies to meet those goals. They support them and coach them along the way, so those people are both hired for and act in such a way that again, meets those students where they’re at. I think for us, we don’t treat students as if they’re kids; in fact, that is literally on the wall.

“Students are young people and we believe that students are the most powerful agents for social change in the world, and not just because it sounds good on a bumper sticker, but because we’ve seen it lived out and we believe it.”

If that’s the case, then that informs everything: our creative, all of our campaigns, all of our strategies as an organization. What goes a very long way is meeting students where they’re at. The people who go and work with them look like them and talk like them, act like them, and the message very clearly is, “You don’t have to be older. You don’t have to have more money. You don’t have to have a higher education, even, to make real impact in the world.” I think that that sets the stage for a relationship to develop between those students and our organization, or our staff, that is very intimate and is very authentic. It doesn’t just feel like selling a box of candy bars for another school fundraiser. 

On the flip side, with all of our adult donors, whether it’s board members or brand partners and sponsors, we’re very relational on that side, as well. In a different way, obviously, but for us, we try to close the circle as much as possible for donors who support our work, whether it’s a donor that funds our school programs or whether it’s a donor that funds a well. Reporting is a big part of that – actually transparently reporting back on progress and impact. Also, finding ways to sort of create that magic for those donors throughout the stages of their experience with Thirst Project, whether that’s intimate individual relationships with the team, or whether it’s through media that we create, or things that support and celebrate the donor experience… We spend a lot of time thinking through that experience for a donor, thinking about how to connect them to the outcomes, or impact, of the work that they’re supporting, which I think creates an emotional connection for them that keeps them feeling that it’s not just writing a check to something.

Absolutely. I feel like Thirst Project really is an experience through and through, all the way from visiting the website for the first time to actually getting involved on a deeper, long-term level. Being a self-declared youth organization, have you encountered any obstacles in relation to focusing on youth in particular, or balancing youth with your older donors?

The answer is mostly no. Mostly, we don’t really encounter major or significant obstacles by having declared ourselves pretty decidedly a youth organization. If there ever has been, which they’d be pretty few and far between, there may be a time here or there where we encounter a donor who is maybe an older person. For us, anyone twenty-five or older is an old person, so I am an old person.

“There were a handful – I would say two or three parents – who wrote in and were like, ‘This is offensive.’ And my response was, ‘Good! You should be offended. Kids dying from waterborne diseases is offensive.’”

Obviously, that’s not what they meant, but we’re pretty unapologetic about who our audience is, how we work with that audience, how we message to that audience, and the fact that we treat that audience as real people with agency. Thankfully, we haven’t really encountered a lot of obstacles by declaring ourselves a youth organization, but I think if there ever are, it’s usually someone who doesn’t get the messaging, and in that case, I think we’ve just decided, “Hey, that’s okay. They’re not for us.”

It’s almost like, if someone is getting so caught up in one sample of text that they’re missing the entire purpose behind it, which is the water crisis. 

Absolutely.

Thirst Project has been working to help everyone in the Kingdom of Eswatini have water for a while, and you previously said your goal was 100% coverage by 2022. How is that going? 

Yeah, so originally that goal was 2022. We’re still a ways out from that, and we’re pretty aware that that date will not be the year in which we reach that goal. However, we’re not too far off. It’s probably more realistically like a 2027 goal, 2028, maybe. We’re making tremendous progress, and I know that we will absolutely reach the goal; it’s just a question of time.

That’s incredible. What other goals do you have for Thirst Project in 2020?

We’ve just entered our second decade; it’s our eleventh year in operation, officially. For us, a great deal of effort and energy is being placed on our school programs, for a couple reasons. We know that for every dollar we spend on our school tour and school programs, students raise about 2.3 dollars for water projects, so a lot of my focus this year is really on building out our school teams to be more robust, adding more school tour teams and speakers, and then also continuing to develop deeper partnership relationships. We work with a lot of student organizations, like Key Club, the Kiwanis Family, or Model United Nations, where we’re sort of the service partner of those clubs. There are some new partners I’ve identified at the national or international level that can help to amplify our message to students much more aggressively, too.

“This year, our goal is that we’re hoping to bring safe water to about 120,000 people.”

[help them reach their goal here]

Wow, that’s so awesome. Thank you so much for the work you do, seriously. What a difference you’re all making on a global level.

Oh, no, thank you so much. We couldn’t do it without support.

Speaking of support, what is it like being a CEO? There aren’t too many people I know who are CEOs of nonprofits and under the age of forty. What is that like? 

It’s interesting because, for me, this is my eleventh year leading this organization and in so many ways, Thirst Project defined my twenties. Where I think that like, maybe people my age would have been going out and doing different things when they were twenty-two and twenty-three and twenty-four, I had employees and things I had to do or else there were very real consequences. It’s sort of weird because I’ve kind of grown up, in a sense, with the organization and its sort of always been my baby. I kind of don’t know anything else. I don’t know any other way. 

Yeah, of course. I admire you. And then because you are a storyteller, and because you’re going into your eleventh year, can you share a lesson or one particular memory that stands out to you in retrospect?

Man, oh man. I can give a few different years; I don’t know that one stands out more than the other. Obviously, year one: there were so many foundational challenges of questions that had to be answered as far as who we thought we wanted to be, where we thought we wanted to go, and how to build out some of the initial infrastructure of those things. I think year three stands out because that was the first year we hired any other full-time staffers besides me. I think year four, four and a half, stands out because that’s when we launched the campaign for Swaziland. This past year really stands out for so many reasons. The tenth anniversary was sort of symbolic, but also there were just so many things that happened that were huge milestones. We launched a brand-new event where we gathered student leaders together from about two-hundred schools across the world. They came together for a leadership development conference we hosted. It was the first time in our history with our school programs that we’ve been able to get multiple students from multiple schools together in one place at one time and build community amongst them, invest in their leadership development, and send them home equipped to hopefully do even more in the coming years. That was just a really special moment for us. Our overall fundraising goals were the best performance we had ever seen last year and the impact was amazing. There were lots of really good milestones last year. I think it’s hard to pinpoint one year.

Definitely. No two days are alike, but what does a day in your life look like?

Oh, my gosh. No two days are definitely ever alike. I would say my time at work, at least, is split pretty much into one of three buckets: either fundraising, overseeing our water projects, or leading our team. It’s not necessarily an even split in terms of time or effort, but in order to achieve those three goals of developing our water projects, administrating and leading our team, and fundraising, I spend a great deal of time between different meetings or calls, just trying to keep the wheels on the bus and keep it moving. I do a lot of phone calls, a lot of meetings, which probably sounds really boring, but it’s sort of running from one thing to the next to try to move the ball down the field in all three of those categories as fast as possible. 

Also… what is one thing everyone should know how to do?

“Everyone should know how to bring themselves joy, or how to find the joy in their own life. I think a lot of times, we assign the responsibility for our own joy, or our own happiness, to other people or other things, or circumstances – our jobs, how much money we make, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, our loved one, whatever – and I think that if we were to realize our own responsibility to take care of that for ourselves, it would change the dynamic of a lot of relationships and a lot of things in the world.”

Absolutely. What advice, if any, do you have for other people wanting to either start a non-profit, or wanting to pursue and work in that industry?

When it comes to starting a non-profit, my hypocritical answer is: don’t. The caveat, or follow-up to that is Nancy Lublin, who was the CEO of Do Something for a long time and she’s a founder of Crisis Text Line, has a brilliant saying where she says, “Unless it’s going to be the first, the only, the better, faster, or cheaper… if it’s not one of those five things, don’t start something new.” Rather than kill yourself to amass resources and build infrastructure, you should align with a group that’s already doing what you do, probably with greater resources and probably with years of experience and trial and error that you’re going to have to essentially go down the same path of. Bring your talent or resources to that team that’s working in that area. Obviously, I think the exception for us when we started was that there are lots of great water organizations, but nobody was activating young people around this issue. We are the largest, and really one of the only, youth water organizations in the world. With that said, if you say, “Yes, this is an issue that I care about,” whatever that issue is, and no one is serving a particular population in this space, no one is providing a particular solution in the way that you want to – if it’s going to be the first, better, faster, or cheaper – yeah, then by all means, sure. Go for it. As far as advice for starting your own, I would really lean into what I said at the beginning, which is that none of us can do any of this alone. Really be very honest and get really real with yourself about the areas that you don’t excel at, and find people who are great at those things, and bring them around the table to join with you and make what you do really effective. 

“So, really, answer those questions: what breaks your heart? And where is an organization that you believe in, that’s doing work that you can actually contribute to in a meaningful way and that is going to contribute to your overall goals as a career, not just something that you really care about?”

So, when it comes to those causes that breaks your heart, something I have found to be true for me personally is not necessarily balance, but keeping a healthy yet realistic perspective. You hear about devastating crises, and you want to help, but even if you are doing everything you can, sometimes these crises are so big that they cannot be fixed overnight, or quickly. What advice do you have for someone who gets overwhelmed or discouraged by not seeing things progress as quickly as they’d like, especially when certain crises are life or death?

It probably sounds very cheesy, but I would say to really lean into the reality into the truth of what you just said, which is that no issue that is significant and sweeping and may break your heart can be solved immediately. Know that, and give yourself permission both to take a beat and celebrate what you accomplish while also knowing that if you are really doing your best and have done everything you can, then that is just that. It’s your best. You’ve contributed in a way that is meaningful and enacted real effect. It takes all of us doing just that to make the impact we want to make.

No one person, no one organization, even, can address the global water crisis. Today, 663 million people don’t have safe water. World Vision, water.org, Charity Water, Conserve Worldwide US, Living Water International, us [Thirst Project] … we’re some of the largest players in the space, and the ones I listed before Thirst Project are even larger than us in terms of just dollars. Even still, no one of us can address this issue wholly. It does truly take everyone coming around the table to contribute to make it happen, whether that is at your own organization or by supporting an existing one. 

“Don’t be discouraged because you can’t solve everything overnight; be encouraged by what you can do, and by the knowledge that there are seven billion people on the planet. If we all do what we can do, then collectively, we make really tremendous impact.”

Lastly, how can we get involved with Thirst Project?

The most important thing is if someone is interested in bringing us to their school, our school tour is free. We’d love to work with schools and students. Go to thirstproject.org to find out how to bring us to their school. If someone is interested in donating or fundraising, they can also visit our website, or text the keyword THIRST to 97779.

 You can follow Seth on Instagram here.

Be sure to follow Thirst Project on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and don’t forget to check out their website for ways to donate, get involved, or request a (free!) school tour.

All photos courtesy of Thirst Project.