What we’ve been able to do is actually connect the capital markets to these financial partners. We have over 200 financial partners around the world that are making these loans. And so now you can see, okay, if we can create the financial plumbing that can connect somebody in the US who wants a financial return on their investment with a woman who needs a loan and can repay that loan, then it’s like, okay, we have a solution that really starts to map to what we’re talking about. And I think that’s key to it. But I also don’t want it to get… We’re seeing Get Blue as a way for us to take this story in a different direction. I can geek out on all this…
Damon: We can put you right to sleep. And we have, at conferences, all over the world….
White: That’s what we’re trying to do now.
Damon: We should have an app. A sleep app.
Your dulcet tones. But, OK—so the focus is shifting, with this GetBlue campaign.
White: Expanding.
Damon: Yeah. The great thing about this system of micro-loaning is that it’s driven the philanthropic cost per person [way] down. So classically it costs $25 to get somebody safe water. But what we’ve been puzzling over for years, the question we get all the time from people, is How do I help? And Get Blue is a way to say to people, Look, in your everyday life, without changing much at all, if you look for Get Blue products, and that’s where you put your dollar, some of the proceeds from, say, the blue matcha that you buy, that’s going to Water.org. That’s going directly to this problem. And so if you’re keeping that ticker in your head that $25 gets an entire family on the other side of the world clean water, then you start to realize that you really are having a major impact just by being intentional about how you’re spending the money that you were going to spend anyway.
We’re taking on new ones as they come, but the founding partners are Gap, Amazon, and Starbucks. Ecolab as well, which is a B2B, but that’s different. But the public-facing, consumer-facing brands are Gap, Starbucks, and Amazon.
White: And [we’re] working with TikTok now as well.
Damon: [wryly] Which is right in our wheelhouse.
The world has changed a lot in the past twenty years, and in the past few months the Trump administration has made huge cuts to humanitarian-aid programs. Are organizations like Water.org dealing with challenges today that didn’t exist when you got into this?
Damon: Well, look—we’ve never taken government money. We never had any USAID money, but the disappearance of that funding across all these different areas is definitely felt by anybody who’s trying to raise money. There’s suddenly a $40 billion shortfall that didn’t exist last year. And so the donor pond just got a lot more full of fish looking to eat. So we certainly feel that. I would say probably that’s the biggest one.