Thirst summary

Since he was around six years old, Scott had been playing the piano, starting with an old pump organ belonging to his grandparents. Looking to make friends at his new school, Scott responded to a flyer from a band looking for a keyboard player, and soon enough he was a member of Sunday River.

It being the early 1990s, Sunday River sounded like a cross between Pearl Jam and Counting Crows, yet they were good enough to start getting gigs and even recorded a demo tape. Scott immediately became quite active in pushing the group forward, calling up clubs to book gigs and promoting the band – so much so, that he skipped a lot of classes in his senior year and barely graduated.

While working at Nell’s, Scott became friends with the club’s manager Tex Axile, a colorful Scottish character with an endearingly foul mouth. Aside from learning many new swear words, Tex also taught Scott the ins and outs of nightclub management.

Then, one day, Tex told Scott about a new 10,000-square-foot dinner club called Lotus that was opening up in Manhattan’s trendy Meatpacking District and looking for promoters. Scott didn’t have much of a track record, but he clearly had energy and ambition, so the management at Lotus took a chance and, with low expectations, he was given the slowest night of the week to promote: Mondays.

The next logical step in the career of a promoter like Scott would have been to own his own club, but Scott was moving in another direction, away from the New York City nightlife altogether. He was listening to sermons from the businessman-turned-Bible teacher, Chuck Missler, on his iPod, and trying to cut down on the smoking and drinking – which isn’t easy to do when Budweiser and Bacardi are each paying you $2,000 a month to be seen drinking their products.

But just as Scott was beginning to reconnect to his faith, there came an event that would really change his life once and for all.

In October 2004, the Mercy Ships’s 522-foot passenger liner left the Canary Islands for Cotonou, a port in Benin, Africa. Scott had sold off nearly everything in his New York City apartment, boarding the ship with little else besides a vintage Louis Vuitton bag stuffed with clothes and some packs of Nicorette.

Scott was among over 300 workers who kept the boat and the onboard hospital running smoothly. On the way to their destination, Scott learned some eye-opening details about Benin’s eight million residents, such as their average life expectancy of 51 years and the fact that they only had four doctors for every 100,000 people. Comparatively, the United States has seven doctors for every 325 people and an average life expectancy of 79 years.

Scott not only started a blog to share his Mercy Ships experiences, but he also used the prized mailing list of 15,000 people he’d formed during his time as a promoter to blast his posts out to his former clients. Some people unsubscribed immediately, unhappy about unexpectedly seeing a giant oozing tumor in their inbox, but by the end of Scott’s first voyage, his readers had actually increased.

Scott had witnessed people blinded by cataracts regain their sight, as well as kids who’d lost their lips, noses or cheeks due to dirty drinking water that contained the deadly noma virus. This is a terrible flesh-eating disease that can be easily prevented by better sanitation. He prayed for all of them and was forced to reconcile with many of the things he’d taken for granted during his life, like access to clean shelter, medical care and safe drinking water.

In spring 2006, Scott met a woman known as Mama Vic who ran an orphanage about an hour outside of Monrovia, Liberia. Sometimes she looked after 150 kids, and the closest source of water was a mile and a half away, and the children hated fetching the water as they were often bullied by the local kids for being orphans.

Moved by her amazing resilience in helping so many children amid terrible conditions and often violent times in Liberia, Scott called his aunt and uncle to raise the $2,500 needed to drill a well for the orphanage.

When Scott started charity: water, he didn’t want to just create another place for someone to make a donation, feel good for a moment and then forget about it. Instead, he wanted to create a revolutionary charity with “radical transparency” that ensured every penny of a donation was spent getting people clean water and keeping donors constantly up-to-date on how their money was being put to use.

To engage donors in exciting new ways, Scott came up with the idea for birthday campaigns. This allowed people to set up a campaign page on the charity: water website where they could direct friends and family to make a donation rather than buy presents.

Rachel’s story was both heartbreaking and inspiring, and, as with all donor money, Scott felt a great responsibility to use each cent she raised as best he could. For this reason, each partnership charity: water makes with the businesses drilling the wells in Africa is put through a rigorous vetting process, and detailed reports are given to every donor, whether they give $1 or $1,000 so that they can see what’s happening with the project they helped fund.

So, it was frustrating, to say the least, when Scott learned that a corporate donor was so displeased with charity: water’s efforts that they were filing a lawsuit.

In 2012, Scott was sitting in a hotel bar in Ethiopia when the owner approached him to say thanks for the work he’d done in the area. The owner explained that he was from a village where it was very difficult to access water. It was such an ordeal, that when one woman fell and broke her pot of water, she was so distraught that she hanged herself from a tree just outside the village.

The story haunted Scott, and when he got back home, he wanted to find out more. With some help, he traced the story back to an isolated Ethiopian village called Meda. So, in November 2013, Scott wanted to learn more and undertook the difficult nine-hour hike to Meda.

As the story of Letikiros shows, clean water not only prevents disease, it also empowers people, especially young women, by allowing them to get an education and avoid having to choose between a clean body and clean clothes.

Scott’s commitment to keeping charity: water growing led him to consider stepping down as CEO in 2015. That year was the first time they didn’t bring in more donations than the year before. And the truth is, Scott knows he isn’t the best CEO. To begin with, he doesn’t enjoy running meetings and holding employees accountable.