Scott Harrison

The story in the curator’s words

Before there was water

Before there was water, there was gas. Scott Harrison was four years old when a carbon-monoxide leak collapsed his mother on the bedroom floor and destroyed her immune system. The boy who wanted to be a doctor became her caretaker instead. He would spend his adulthood caring for millions. He took the long way there.

For almost ten years he was a New York nightclub promoter: two packs a day, drunk most nights, a Rolex on his wrist, charging men five hundred dollars for forty-dollar champagne. On a New Year’s trip to Uruguay, surrounded by everything money was supposed to buy, he wanted the music to stop. He sold almost everything he owned and gave himself one year to serve other people instead of himself.

A hospital ship off Liberia

Every credible humanitarian organization turned him down; his past was too loud. One let him in only if he paid five hundred dollars a month for the privilege. That is how a burned-out promoter became a volunteer photographer on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, watching a surgeon named Dr. Gary Parker give people their faces back.

Out in the villages he found the rest of his life. People drinking from scummy ponds with the bugs still in them. Women and girls walking hours a day for water that was making them sick. Dirty water kills more people than every form of violence on earth combined, war included. Nearly one in ten people alive don’t have clean water to drink.

Proof of where the money went

He did the only thing he knew how to do. He threw a party (his thirty-first birthday, seven hundred people, twenty dollars at the door) that built and repaired wells in a refugee camp in northern Uganda, and sent every guest the photos, the GPS coordinates, the proof of where the money went.

Forty-two percent of Americans don’t trust charities, so charity: water was built to earn it back. One hundred percent of public donations go to the field; overhead lives in a separate account, covered by a smaller circle of backers. Every project is proven: photos, GPS pins on Google Maps, and sensors on the wells that report how much clean water is still flowing years later.

Rachel’s birthday

Then it stopped being his story. A nine-year-old named Rachel Beckwith asked for clean water instead of birthday presents, raised two hundred and twenty dollars, and died in a car accident a few weeks later. Strangers finished what she started: more than a million dollars, for a child they never met.