The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
First Time Founders with Ed Elson – This Nonprofit Raised $1B to Bring Clean Water to the World
Sun, 06 Apr 2025
Ed speaks with Scott Harrison, the founder and CEO of Charity: Water. They discuss his journey from nightclub promoter to non-profit founder, how his organization leverages technology to enhance its transparency, and the key strategies behind his fundraising success. Learn more about Charity: Water Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Scott Harrison and what is Charity: Water?
And I'm not, I want to be clear, I'm not passionate about potable water in Sub-Saharan Africa, but Scott is just such a visionary that, you know, he'll be a great fiduciary for your money. And just personally, I just think a great deal of him and the transformation he's gone through. So it's, I mean, I just think about it. It really is an inspiring story.
Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. Every month on this show, we talk to founders from a wide range of industries. But one sector we've yet to explore is the nonprofit world. The US is home to over 1.8 million nonprofit organizations, each addressing critical issues in unique ways. Now, 19 years ago, my next guest founded one of the most influential nonprofits in the country.
with a mission to bring clean water to those without access. Since then, his organization has raised over $1 billion, funding more than 184,000 water projects in 29 countries and providing clean water to over 20 million people. This is my conversation with Scott Harrison, founder and CEO of Charity Water. You are the first nonprofit founder that we've had on this podcast.
We've had many founders, a lot of tech founders. We had Bobby Brown, who was a makeup founder. We had Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix. We've never had a nonprofit founder, so I'm very excited. It's a distinguished honor. We're very excited to have you. And I want to start with your history because it's actually very unusual. So you grew up in New Jersey. You went to NYU for college.
That part isn't unusual. But then you started your career actually as a nightclub promoter. Yeah. And here you are today, the founder of one of the largest and most successful nonprofit organizations in America and in the world. That's not a normal career trajectory. So take us from the beginning.
Tell us about your upbringing and how it led to your life, not as the founder of Charity Water, but as a promoter in New York City.
Well, when I was four, my mom almost died. Like you said, I was born in Philadelphia, actually. We had moved to Jersey to get closer to my dad's job. And we had just bought this very ugly gray house at the end of a cul-de-sac in the dead of winter. And we didn't know that we had just bought a house with a carbon monoxide gas leak.
Oh, wow.
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Chapter 2: How did Scott Harrison transition from nightclub promoter to nonprofit founder?
And we start getting these strange symptoms, headaches, and migraines. And on New Year's Day, 1980, my mom passes out. She's unconscious on the bedroom floor, and she's essentially the canary in the coal mine, which leads to the discovery of massive amounts of carbon dioxide in her bloodstream, leads to the discovery of the leak, which was a improperly installed heat exchanger in the basement.
And my dad has an HVAC guy friend come over, and they rip this thing out, and I remember this crumpled heater on the curb that really didn't did irreparable damage to our family. What happened with my mom specifically is her immune system irreparably shut down after the carbon monoxide poisoning, and she was disabled and invalid for the rest of her life. My dad and I bounced back.
We were only sleeping in the house. We were sleeping upstairs. She was 24-7 unpacking boxes, you know, putting things in the basement and got the brunt of the exposure. So life had a radical change at four years old when I became a caregiver. Dad was a middle-class business guy, worked kind of in the electrical engineering space. Mom had been a successful writer.
She was a journalist, and everything just stopped for her. So she was allergic. The best way to describe it is she was allergic to the world. If it was chemical and if it smelled, it made her sick. perfume, car fumes, fabric softener. There were signs on the outside of our house, keep out, chemically sensitive patient.
I remember if I went to church and a lady hugged me and I came back with a little whiff of perfume, I would have to strip naked in the garage, change into surgical clothes, like hospital scrubs that had been washed in baking soda. And then I was allowed in my own house. So that was kind of, you know, chapter one of life. Very traditional Christian family, non-denominational.
My parents prayed a lot. They went to church and they really would rely on their faith to get them through, you know, what would be decades of sickness and illness. So I grew up in that context, going to Christian school, then, you know, a public high school. I wanted to be a doctor.
When I grew up, I had dreams of going to Johns Hopkins so that I could get a medical degree and cure my mom and then cure others with her condition. Didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't sleep around, didn't cuss. You know, was on the good path. And then act two started at 18 when I came to New York City and somebody took me to a nightclub.
And I remember it was called Club USA and there was a slide that went from the balcony into the throng of the dance floor. And I remember going down that slide And feeling like I had arrived. You came out a new man. I came out a new man.
So I announced to my parents that instead of going to Hopkins, which I probably couldn't have gotten into anyway, I would be moving to New York City to become a nightclub promoter. Because I learned that this was a pretty unusual profession that you could party for a living.
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Chapter 3: What inspired Scott Harrison to start Charity: Water?
Oh, Scott. I used to host Scott back in those days. My parents are horrified that their only son is now in New York City filling up nightclubs before he's even legally allowed to be in clubs. And I joined a band, I grew my hair down to my shoulders, so I was playing in a rock band part-time.
I was going to NYU part-time just because dad had saved up and it felt like I should take a couple courses and eventually mail him a degree that I never even saw for years. And I just loved every minute of it. I mean, this was lights and glamour and dinner at 10 p.m. with fashion models and other people's money and other limousines.
And, you know, it was kind of the dawn of bottle service where we all realized that you could sell a bottle of Absolute Vodka for $300. Yeah. That cost 20.
So that was not true before?
When did that happen? So this is... My years were 1994 to 2004. Okay. So this was clubs like Lotus, Halo, Sweet 16. You know, this is before kind of marquee for people that, you know, know that club. It was Peter Gation at the Limelight and Tunnel, Club USA, Buddha Bar down on Varick. So it was... I mean, I just loved every minute of it. And it also felt rebellious.
You know, I'm living out my childhood, the childhood I never got by having fun and having, you know, illicit fun. So, you know, I play this out for a while and I'm climbing up the ranks and I'm trying to chase models and make sure I own a BMW or Mercedes and have a nice place. And it's exhausting. Number one, it's really an unhealthy schedule. Your dinner was at 10 p.m. The club was at 12.
After hours was at 4 a.m. And going to sleep was at noon. High on cocaine, taking Ambien to come down so that you could wake up at 7 p.m. and do it all over again.
Sounds good.
I don't have a problem with that. Well, I didn't for a while. I think it was Hemingway that said, you know, going bankrupt, like it happens slowly and then suddenly. So I remember this one moment on Houston Street where I was crashing at a friend's place and it was noon. And I remember taking sheets and comforters and trying to block out the light.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Scott Harrison face while starting Charity: Water?
And this group was a charity that consisted of doctors and surgeons and nurses who would all give up vacation time. They would fly to West Africa and they would offer free medical services to people who had no ability to afford them. And they operated, which was unique, from a 500-foot hospital ship.
So an old kind of broken down converted ocean cruise liner had been gutted and turned into a state-of-the-art hospital that sailed up and down the coast of Africa with 350 volunteer crew, all paying $500 a month like me, which helped the organization run. So I had never heard of Liberia before. I couldn't have found it on the map. You know, I joke, and I don't think this is hyperbole.
I think I thought Africa was a country not made up of 50-some. Geography had been a distant past. I learned quickly. And my third day there, I had a really important moment where it was called the patient screening. And in advance of the ship landing, with the doctors coming into the port, a small team had posted flyers advertising the coming of these doctors throughout the country.
And these flyers had pictures of conditions that we treated, cleft lips, cleft palates, flesh-eating disease, facial tumors, people who had been burned during the war who needed reconstruction. And, you know, we arrive at the port, my third day in Africa. We wake up at 5 a.m.
and the government has given us the soccer stadium, the football stadium in the center of the city to triage the people who had come and put them through our stations and then hand out these surgery cards. And I knew that we had 1,500 available surgery cards. And when we turned up around 5.30 in the morning to the parking lot, there were over 5,000 people
waiting for us to open the doors of the stadium. And that hit me really hard seeing a need that was so much greater than what we were prepared to meet. And then actually seeing us turn away more than 3,000 sick people who had come, many of them had walked even for more than a month from neighboring countries as the word had spread.
And they didn't get a chance to see a doctor because we didn't have enough doctors.
So you're working at Mercy Ships. You're doing this work for two years. At what point do you then decide, okay, enough of working for other people. I want to do something myself.
So I loved it. I took 50,000 photos the first year. I got to watch every single patient pre and post-op. And the cool thing was I actually had a pretty big email list that I developed. So like it or not, You know, you went from getting an invitation to the Prada megastore opening in Soho to Alfred is 14 and suffocating to death on his face with the tumor pictures. So there were some unsubscribes.
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Chapter 5: How did Scott Harrison utilize storytelling and media to grow Charity: Water?
I mean, back then, email open rates were basically 100%. You know, you sent an email and people opened it. So some people got off the list, but others began to forward it. And the list actually grew exponentially. And I think some of my friends were just fascinated. Like, weren't you doing Coke with Scott like last month? And like, where's Liberia? You know, what is this hospital ship mission?
So I was blogging a lot. I was sending out photos and videos. And I wound up raising money for the organization, over $100,000. just by telling these stories. So I think that was kind of this aha piece that maybe the same gift for promoting could be aimed in a completely different direction and could be used to raise money that helped people get these life-changing surgeries.
So the year ended, I just signed up for a second year. And it was really in that second year that I went into the rural villages and I saw people drinking dirty water. And I had never experienced dirty water in my human life. I was born into a middle-class family. Water came out of the sink.
I used to sell Voss water for $10 in the clubs to people who wouldn't even open the water because they were drinking champagne instead. So I saw humans drinking toxic, contaminated water from brown, viscous swamps, from green ponds. And I learned that half of the disease in the country was waterborne. And that half the country was drinking dirty water.
So I had this, you know, eureka moment in year two saying, here we are with not enough doctors turning thousands of sick people away with stuff growing on their faces. But yet half the country doesn't have the most basic need for health met. And at the time, there were over a billion people drinking dirty water on the planet out of six billion people.
One in six people alive were drinking unsafe, dirty water every day. So I remember showing the pictures I was taking in the villages to the chief medical officer. And at the end of that second year, he just simply encouraged me, says, why don't you go make this your problem? Why don't you go back to New York and bring clean water to everybody in the world?
And I was like, all right, I guess I'll try. So the second year ended. I was 30. I was broke. Nightclub promoters, at least I was not good at saving money. I was very good at spending it. And I just came back. I'd given everything that I had to Mercy Ships and the people that I'd met in Africa. So I came back really penniless.
Then I found out that my club promoter partner had not dissolved the company. So I came back to a big tax debt. And he said, sorry about that, but you can sleep on my closet floor for free in Soho.
Yeah, I read that you, when you started this out, you started out by reading the non-profit kit for dummies. And as you mentioned, you also turned to your contacts in the nightlife industry. I'm sure you probably turned to Scott Galloway himself. In other words, very scrappy beginnings, is what I would say.
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