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Nonprofit Leadership Podcast
Learn more about the nonprofit Matt Damon co-founded
00:34:15
Safe water. While most of us have access to it, there are millions across the world who do not. There are approximately 700 million ...
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- [00:02]
Dr. Rob Harder
This is Dr. Rob Harder with the nonprofit leadership podcast, Making youg World Better. What does it take to be an effective nonprofit leader today? What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest obstacles? How should nonprofits fundraise in an economy that is constantly changing? All of these reasons combined led me to start this show. And it's my hope that through this series, people can learn not only what it takes to be an effective nonprofit organization, but to hear from effective leaders who are successful successfully making a positive impact in their communities. We hope you enjoy the show as together we hear how they are making their world better. Water is an essential to life. I think we all would agree to that. And yet, for those in the United States, I think it's very difficult to even think that you wouldn't have access to safe and clean water and sanitation. And yet, for millions around the world, access to safe water and sanitation is not a given. Well, today's guest is working with one of the more innovative international nonprofits that have really been moving the needle when it comes to providing safe water and sanitation. That organization is water.org their co founder is actually actor Matt Damon. Matt has stated this that access to water is access to education, livelihoods, health, and possibilities. Water.org is a leading provider of safe water and sanitation access, rapidly scaling its reach. In fact, just in 2019, the organization had been reaching 16 million people. Well, now, just four years later, the organization has reached 60 million people, more than doubling its impact. So today we have the coo, Vedika, who's going to be my guest today, and she'll share all about how they've scaled this organization, how they've upscaled their staff along the way, and really improve their fundraising efforts in order to more than double their impact and in a short amount of time. Enjoy today's show. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox. DonorBox, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business. Bideka, so good to have you on the show today. Thanks so much for joining.
- [02:08]
Vedika
Thank you so much, Rob, for having me. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.
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Dr. Rob Harder
Oh, you bet. Well, I think what I've learned about water.org, the organization you work with, you're doing such important work. And so I'm very excited to dive into this and learn a little bit more about how you're structured, how you've grown, and specifically, I want to focus the show a bit because there's so many things we could talk about with what you're doing, but you've been very successful with scaling your organization and many nonprofit leaders. Certainly my listeners, and perhaps I could argue maybe most nonprofit leaders want to see their organization grow and even scale to double or triple their size. But it's easier said than done. Water.org has been very successful in that and has scaled very rapidly. In fact, before we go into all the strategies you implemented to scale, I thought maybe it'd be good just to give us a bit of the history, tell us a bit of the background of the organization. I know for my listeners, they'll be excited or interested to hear that this organization is co founded by Matt Damon, the actor. So your organization has some serious star power to it, which I'm sure helps on the fundraising side.
- [03:10]
Vedika
So.
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Dr. Rob Harder
But yeah, let's start with that. Let's start with a quick history on how and why this organization got started and then we'll get into the nuts and bolts of how you've scaled it so quickly.
- [03:18]
Vedika
Sure. Thank you. So water.org is a global, not for profit. And we are focused exclusively on enabling access to safe water and safely managed sanitation for people living in poverty across the world. And our CEO, Gary White, who is also the co founder of the organization, started an organization called Water partners more than 30 years ago. And then in 2009, he and Matt Damon got together. Matt had a smaller organization called H2O Africa. They came together in 2009 and the combined organization is called water.org. so we're really fortunate to have both the co founders, Gary and Matt. And I would say Matt is a very engaged co founder. Of course he leverages his star power for fundraising, no question. But I've also found him to be really passionate about the subject. And he's been passionate and he's very engaged and he continues to learn about the subject. And as you'll hear me say, talk about later, we are as much a water organization as we are a financing organization. And so Matt has also made a real effort to learn about both water and financing. And I think at the the heart of what we do is the solution that we have, which is market oriented and we believe and we absolutely have at the center of what we do is the people who we serve. They do know what solutions they want. So they do know how to get a water connection or to build a toilet. But what they lack is the money to do that. Right. And access to capital. And that's what our solution is based around, on how to make sure that they do have access to capital at an affordable rate.
- [05:16]
Dr. Rob Harder
Now. Very interesting and thank you for that brief history that's very interesting, always to hear how organizations start and then how they kind of merge and grow and expand. Now there's several nonprofits out there that focus on providing safe and clean water to communities that need it. But I'm curious, what, in your mind, what sets apart water.org and your approach?
- [05:36]
Vedika
Sure. And I think that's a great question. And before we get to it, you're absolutely right. So there are many, many water organizations, and we're very grateful there are so many because unfortunately, the world does need all of these and many more. Right. So I just want to first spend a couple of minutes scaling the dimension of the issue. Right? So today, almost 700 people, even today, in this day and age, almost 700 million people do not have access to safe water. That's one in 11 people across the world, Right. And for somebody sitting here in the United States, it's almost impossible to imagine There are almost 1 in 4 people or 1.6 billion people who do not have access to a toilet and their homes. And so I wanted to give you the scale of the issue. Right. And then I also want to link it to what happens when you don't have safe water or a toilet at home. Women go to collect water, and it's more often than not, it's the women, their daughters drop out of school because they're helping their mothers collect water. And it's estimated that women and girls spend 200 million hours per day collecting water. Right. It's a staggering statistic. And even after spending eight years in this organization, this statistic still just gets me. I talked about girls dropping out of school. More than couple of hundred thousand children die every year because of waterborne diseases. And if you think about the economic cost or not having enough water or sanitation, that's estimated to be $260 billion per year. So the scale even. And I haven't even talked about climate change, Right. Climate change is making these numbers much worse, Right. Because when you think about climate change, it almost always gets reflected in water. Either you have too much of it, so you have flooding, which impacts water quality, or you have too little, which is drought. And then you again, you don't have water again at home. So because of the scale of the issue, it does need all the not for profits and in fact, all the actors to focus on this issue. Because the reverse is also true, Right? If you do have water, you obviously are healthier. The girls are going back to school. The women are not spending that much time collecting water. So they are spending, spending that time to generate more income for their families. And so the positive is also so much true, right? So then what makes us different? And that was your second question. So when we started off, we were a very conventional, not for profit, and we would give money to communities to dig wells. And we soon realized two things. We realized there isn't enough money in the world to solve this if we go the conventional route. And the second most important point, we realize that people who live in poverty are paying very high cost for the water. They're paying high cost either in terms of dollars and cents. So as a percentage of income, think of the water bill you and I pay in terms of a percentage of our income. But the poor are paying as high as 25, even 30% of their income if they are buying water from a water tanker, for example, and. Or they're paying very high cost in terms of coping costs, right? So again, women having to spend hours or girls dropping out of school, or healthcare costs, these are all coping costs. So we said, given both of these things, how can we find a solution which is much more scalable and where we can get really every dollar or every rupee or every euro to stretch to the maximum? So we started looking around and saying, okay, are there channels which whose clients are people who we want to serve? And we realized actually there are financial institutions whose clients are the people we want to serve. And so we started with microfinance, because that's the most obvious one. And we said microfinance institutions give loans for different things, right? They give you a loan if you want to set up a shop or if you want to buy a car. How can we convince the microfinance institutions to lend money if Vedika wants to get a water connection at home? And that's how our journey really started. And we said, if we can get access to affordable capital in the hands of a Vedica, if she doesn't have a water connection at home, then she can get the water connection at home. And that's what makes us different. So approaching it from a financing angle and saying that's one of the biggest barriers that stand between people and access. And if we can solve that, and if we can partner with institutions which reach the same people who you want to, then we have a much more scalable solution.
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Dr. Rob Harder
Now, first of all, thanks for giving us a little bit of the background, just the scale of the issue. I think for all of us, all of my listeners, myself included, I didn't realize the scale of the issue. It's Huge. It's a massive issue. And so yeah, there can't probably be enough nonprofits really approaching and addressing these issues. So thanks for sharing that. And then very interesting to hear your approach. And we're going to get a little bit more into that financing in just a bit. But as we talk about now scaling and your organization, how it's grown so much as I started on the outset, I think a lot of organizations want to grow, but they don't always know how to do it or how to do it well. So just for again, my listeners, a few facts here. So water.org has grown very rapidly in 2019, just to give you an example, the organization had reached 16 million people. Now that's a lot. 16 million. But four years later, the organization has reached 60 million 6, 060 million people, more than doubling its impact. So let's unpack for my listeners how you got there. What were the steps you took along the way to get to where you are now and particularly maybe you could do it this way. As you look back over the last four years, what were some of those key decision points that got you to this place of doubling your impact so quickly?
- [11:50]
Vedika
Well, I would love to say, Rob, that it was all a smooth journey. I don't think I can. I would probably answer this in talking about three things. So starting with impact. And you talked about our numbers going from 16 million to 60. So what did we do which was different? We said we really got this bias for scale into all our teams. So we said how can we partner with financial institutions which can scale rapidly and how can we help them scale? Right. So whether in some market it might mean partnering with big banks, in other markets it might mean partnering with cooperators, in some other markets it might mean partnering with self help group organizations and of course with microfinance institutions. So we really got into our programming team this bias for scale. So constantly thinking about reaching more people, bias for scale, but keeping the focus of reaching people living in poverty. So that's the big change we did on the impact side because it's very easy to keep partnering with really small organizations which are great but who would never have scale. So we had to change our partnering approach. So that's one thing which we did differently on the impact side. We also said on the impact side, how can we partner in countries where it does make sense? How can we partner with governments? Because governments always, when they start acting, they deliver scale. So that was the other thing which we did on the impact side. On the funding side for an NGO Funding is always incredibly important. So we said on the funding side, how can we diversify our sources of funding so that we are not putting all our eggs in the proverbial one or two baskets? How can we have different funding sources from grassroots, from a kid who's running an online fundraiser to large corporates, to high net worth individuals. How can we build a diversified funding base? So that was the second deliberate strategy. And the third one was about strengthening the foundation. Strong HR team, strong processes, technology, systems that work, finance, strong controls. And those were the three pieces which we very intentionally focused on because we knew we can't achieve scale if we have only one thing working. If you only focused on programming and didn't really focus on revenue or our foundations, we're going to have lopsided growth. And the same goes with all of the three legs of the story.
- [14:23]
Dr. Rob Harder
Yeah, no, very helpful now. Thank you for sharing that. And there are all those different aspects of what you're doing now. Let's get into hiring. That's been a big part of what you've done. Tell us more about your hiring process and how you've recruited staff along the way.
- [14:35]
Vedika
That's a great question. And you know, Rob, I've been with water.org now eight years and I was thinking back just the other day of what were the reasons which drew me here. And one of the big reasons which drew me here was the quality of people. I was so impressed with the quality of people then as I am now. So it's the quality and the variety. So we do of course have people who are very strong, have always been in this social sector or the development sector. But we also have a lot of people who come from different organizations, who come from the for profit world who bring very different experiences and different skills and they all come together with a very strong mission focus. So when I joined, I think we were about, I'm trying to think maybe in 2019 we were about 140 odd people and now we're about 160, 65, something like that. So not a huge growth. But we, I would say two things. One, constantly looking for, okay, if you're partnering with large banks, what sort of expertise do we need? We need people who have worked in banks. If we want to grow our high net worth revenue pipeline, let's bring people who have done that before. If we want to invest in our systems, let's bring people with systems experience. So that's been one part of it. But the second part, again, which we've been very intentional about, is Upskilling. So upskilling our current team so that as we are evolving, as we are innovating, we are spending the time and energy and money to train our people.
- [16:17]
Dr. Rob Harder
No. And I like that. Let's get into that. When you've grown so quickly, here's my guess. You've hired some people at positions which were perfect at an initial level, maybe when you were at 16 million, for example, but then as you've scaled and grown, doubled your impact to now reaching over 60 million people. I'm guessing along the way, some of those staff were not always in the right position. As you've grown, in other words, the position maybe got bigger than what they could handle. And you mentioned the word upscaling. That tells me that you probably got people that were really had to have and come into the position with more training, more experience, more education, perhaps that's a delicate. I know. Process for a lot of nonprofits that scale and grow because you may have the right person who loves the mission, loves the vision, and been there for a long time, but they just don't have the right skill set or education that now is required because you're much bigger now. Talk about how you process through that and either, you know, maintain the same staff, redirect them to a different role, or just work with current staff while at the same time, like you said, upscaling to kind of improve your professionalism, if you will, at a larger scale.
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Vedika
Yeah. I think the one line answer to your question would be all of the above. So.
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Dr. Rob Harder
All of it. Yep.
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Vedika
Yeah.
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Dr. Rob Harder
Love it.
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Vedika
Yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So if I look back today at our team, we have a mix of people who've been with us for a long time. I think 15 years, 18 years, Gary plus years. But we also have a lot of people who've joined us in the last few years. So I think we have the right mix. So one is making sure we are hiring really based on what skills do we need. Second is constantly investing in upskilling. So making sure that as the organization's growing, people are also growing in terms of their skills. And, you know, because we've been grown so fast, because we are such an innovative organization, we have had, we might not have lots of vertical opportunities to grow, but we have so many lateral opportunities to grow and keep people engaged. And which is great. I mean, I myself have had three. Three roles in this organization. So I think that's been another way to give people more experience, to get people to help them develop. And I think, you know, one of the things which comes across every year when we do our employee surveys is how strongly, irrespective of which year we look at, how strongly are all the people aligned to the mission. And that's really what keeps the them going. That's what makes them stretch. That's what makes them comfortable with the discomfort of growing so fast and helps them comfortable through some ambiguous phases of growth.
- [19:06]
Dr. Rob Harder
We'll be right back. Are you looking for an easy and effective way to boost your nonprofit's donations? Look no further than Donor Box, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your fundraising efforts, maximizes donations, and simplifies giving for your supporters. With DonorBox, you can create beautiful donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, track donations, and send auto receipts. And the best part, there are no setup or monthly fees and no long term contracts required. So what are you waiting for? Visit donorbox.org today to get started. That is donorbox.org hey friends, thanks so much for listening to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. I wanted to let you know that I've recently become a professionally certified coach. With my nearly 30 years of nonprofit experience, I know firsthand how hard leaders work. I also know how important it is to have someone you can call on to get help with the barriers and leadership challenges you will face both professionally and personally. I really want people to thrive and become all they were meant to become by providing coaching and consulting services. If coaching is something you've always been interested in but weren't quite sure what it was all about, I encourage you to reach out. You can go to my website, robharder.com or just email me at rob robharder.com I would be happy to provide a free sample coaching session so you can determine if coaching is for you. Thanks again for listening. Now back to the show. Well said. No, thank you for that. Well, let's keep going with that theme. Another big area for any nonprofit when you're growing, that nonprofit is the fundraising side. So you've got the staffing size growing with that, the structure, how you're going to increase your impact, your upscaling. But at the same time, you need money that whole time to keep, you know, hiring those new staff members, right, to keep providing these more and more services. So I'm sure that's been a huge piece of your growing and scaling. How has your fundraising team been able to keep up with the funding needed as your organization has expanded so quickly?
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Vedika
It's a great question and you're absolutely right. I mean if and, and I always like to joke if a not for Profit were a company, then the two front lines are programming and revenue, and neither can exist without the other. Right. And so you can't grow your impact if you don't have revenue to back up, and you can't grow your revenue if you don't have impact. Right. So it's both. So first, we've been, you know, we've had a great fundraising team and I talked about diversification of funding sources. So that's a journey we are on. Won't say we we have the best mix, but, you know, we are very intentionally working on diversifying that mix. And second, we've been very, really fortunate to have funders with us along our journey. Much before trust based philanthropy became the buzzword, we realized that's what our funders have been giving us. So funders who have allowed us to experiment, who allowed us to innovate, but also at the same time know that we apply a lot of rigor in terms of monitoring, in terms of evaluation, and so. And they've been really, really pleased to see the growth as, as you talked about over the last few years. So I think this is something which will continue to be an issue. How do we continue to diversify? How do we continue to stabilize? How do we make sure that we always have a big enough pipeline? Right. Because we also know funders change their priorities and that happens. Yeah.
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Dr. Rob Harder
Yeah, well said. No, glad to hear that. Okay, now you're currently working in 11 countries. Maybe be fun for my listeners to learn a little bit more about how you've chosen your project sites and which countries and communities you invest in.
- [22:52]
Vedika
That's a great question. So we look at it from two, three different lenses. The first lens we looked at is which are the countries where there is the most need. So where is this? Where are the people who really don't have access to safe water or safely managed sanitation? So that was one filter and I talked about the numbers, Right? So there are many countries across the world. And then we used a second filter because our solution is market based and we didn't speak about. So what exactly do we do? So we partner with financial institutions. We convince a financial institution that, hey, you give loans for different purposes. How about you also give a loan for a water or a sanitation product? So I am a client of a loan of a bank and I've been taking loan for different purposes. I don't have a water connection at home, so I can take a loan for the water connection or to build a toilet. So water.org is not providing capital to the financial institution, but is providing a lot of capacity building help, saying, okay, do you want help how to design the loan product? We can do for you, do that for you. Do you want how to train your staff? We can do that for you. Do you know, want to know how to market it? We can do that for you. So we are providing, we think of us as catalysts, right? And then the financial institutions are going ahead and making loans so that the person who doesn't have access, like me, she gets, I get access to affordable capital and then I borrow, I build a solution, I repay the loan, the financial institution uses that money to lend to Roth, you repay, and so on and so forth. So our financial institution partners across the 11 countries that we work in have cumulatively lent now almost $4.7 billion in local currencies. Right. And that's a huge number. So that brings me to the second criteria. So we look at countries where there's need, but then we also need to look at countries where there is a good financial market. Right. And a culture of market based solutions. And not all countries might have that. So that's our second filter. So today we work in 11 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America. And these 11 countries represent roughly about 70% of the world's need for water and sanitation. So we do believe across these 11 countries, we have a lot of work to do. Yes, we've reached 60 million, but there's a long way to go and that's where we really want to double down in terms of our growth now.
- [25:32]
Dr. Rob Harder
Great. Very interesting to hear how you have these different filters and how you work through the process of selecting countries. And then you had a great segue in terms of how you do the financing. That was going to be another question I asked was you've been quoted as saying this a lack of affordable finance is one of the critical barriers to safe water and sanitation access. So really you've mentioned already this lack of affordable financing is really a key part of what you do, a key part of your organization. Talk more about the specific set of data points that led you to invest in financing so much and how water.org really provides us financing. You already kind of mentioned some of it, but maybe go a little bit more in depth for those who are maybe in a similar type of work or just curious again about how it works in these various countries.
- [26:16]
Vedika
Sure. And you know, often I've found when you're a water NGO and you talk about financing, people go, oh, why? Why are you talking about financing? So I want to start by a quick example, so a couple of, a few months ago, I was in Tanzania. Tanzania is one of the countries that we work in. And a few hours outside of Dar es Salaam, I met this lady called Amina. Amina lives in this small village and she has four children. And she did not have a water connection at home. So every day she had to walk four miles. So the to and from journey was four miles just to collect water for her and her kids. And she said, you know, obviously that was an unsustainable sort of situation. So she reached out to this financial partner of ours and took a loan and dug a bore well in a house. So she had water and she had extra water. So she started selling that water from the bore well to her neighbors. And that's how she repaid that loan. The first loan was less than $500, $300 or something like that. And she repaid that loan. She said, okay, I have water for my family, but I am also selling water to my neighbors. So she took the second loan and this time she bought a pump. She also laid some pipes. And she laid pipes to her neighbors. She was supplying water to them. She repaid that loan. Then she took a third one. She built a storage tank, she dug an additional borewell. And today when I met her, I met her in June, she supplies water to 100 households around her, right? So this is the story I want to tell you because water changes, access to water changes so much. It changed Amina and her family's lifestyle. Her kids all go to school, they are getting educated, and she's financially really independent, and she's supplying water to 150 households around her. So that's what access to financing made a difference, right? It was through these different loans, which is how she was able to first solve her own problem, but then also turn it into an income generating opportunity for herself. And that, that's exactly why when we looked at, okay, what are the barriers that stand between people and access? There are different barriers, but one of the most important barriers which we zoomed in on was the lack of capital. And hence our solution is all around making sure affordable financing is in the hands of people who need it. Now, I told you, we partner with financial institutions. And when we went to a financial institution, partners a few years ago and said, hey, do you see a lot of need among your clients? They said, yeah, so many of our clients do not have safe water or safely managed sanitation. So we see a lot of need among our clients. And we said, how can we help you scale even higher? And one of the things we heard from some of our partners was, well, if we had access to capital ourselves on a regular basis, we could scale our water and sanitation lending even further. So another innovation which we did was we set up a sister organization called Water Equity, which is an asset manager. It's an impact investor. And Water Equity now has $350 million of committed capital. They've raised and invested four funds. And their funds are helping our financial institution partners scale up even faster. So it's an example of both philanthropy as well as investment capital. And the reason, again, that's important is stepping back and saying what is needed for the world, in the world, for everyone to get access. And World bank had run these numbers sometime back, and they said about $1.7 trillion is needed for everybody to get access. The amount of money which is currently spent is only about a third. So it does mean we need every actor to come in, and it does mean we need every form of financing to come in. We need philanthropists, we need governments, we need financial institutions, we need capital markets. We need everybody to come in. And through our two organizations, water.org and water equity, we hope that more and more organizations follow a similar approach and come and act on this.
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Dr. Rob Harder
Well, again, I like how you have really created a niche, if you will, with your approach with the financing piece and now with the capital investment opportunity to actually, you know, help these other blenders scale more quickly. I think that's ingenious. Maybe one last question would just be, do you feel like with all the work you're doing, plus the other charities are doing wonderful work, do you feel like the needle's being moved a bit when it comes to water access, safe and clean water access as well as sanitation? Or are we still just way behind on this curve in terms of the need being so great?
- [31:42]
Vedika
I think you can't work in the development sector without being an optimist. So I am an optimist. I like to go with a glass half full. So, yes, there is progress, certainly. I think we've not yet completely assimilated the impact of climate change, where the risks of backsliding are huge. So, yes, the needle's being moved, but is it moving fast enough? No, I think we need. And if you were to ask me what's the call to action, I would say everybody, right? Irrespective of who you are, whether you're an individual, whether you're a corporation, whether you're a government financial institution, everybody needs to get focused on this because if we when we do solve SDG 6 right, when everybody in the world does have access to safe water and sanitation, we are also going to help the world in so many other ways, right? In terms of education, in terms of gender equity, in terms of health, in terms of food. So I think the benefits are so huge that we do need everybody to focus on it so that the needle just moves much faster.
- [32:50]
Dr. Rob Harder
Yes. No. Well, thank you for that honesty and thanks for your optimism. Love it. Well, Vedica, for those who are listening and want to get to know you a little bit better and find out more about water.org where would you send them?
- [33:00]
Vedika
I would send you all to our water to our website so www.water.org or across social platforms at water. And please do engage with us and please do focus on this issue. It is solvable and it is certainly solvable in our lifetimes.
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Dr. Rob Harder
Okay? I love it. Well, again, thanks so much for taking time. I know you're busy, so thanks for taking time to be on the show. But also give us an overview of this wonderful organization.
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Vedika
No thank you.
- [33:28]
Dr. Rob Harder
Hey friends. Well, I wanted you to know that this podcast can be found on itunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google podcasts, and wherever you listen to other podcasts. I also want to encourage you to like subscribe, subscribe and share this podcast with others. This will actually help us get this great content out to more nonprofit leaders just like you. You can also join the nonprofit leadership podcast community, find other resources and interviews of past guests, all on my website, nonprofitleadershippodcast.org well, thanks again for listening and until next time, keep making your world better. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox, DonorBox, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business.