Photo via Splash.
Schoolchildren in Nepal show the difference between dirty water and water filtered with Splash’s help. Photo via Splash.

Eric Stowe’s mission to give impoverished children clean drinking water started 12 years ago inside the back of a McDonald’s in China. Hoping to see how the corporate giant filtered its own water, Stowe used his polished Chinese to bribe an employee and soon later figured out how exactly McDonald’s was providing clean H2O to its patrons.

Fast forward to 2015, and Stowe’s progress is quite remarkable.

Stowe is the founder and executive director of Splash, a Seattle-based charity that has helped bring clean drinking water to more than 300,000 kids living in poor urban areas of countries like China, Nepal, India, Ethiopia, and Cambodia.

The 41-year-old founded Splash in 2007 after working with international adoption agencies following his graduate work at the University of Washington. As he spent time facilitating adoptions in Asia and Africa, Stowe began to realize the discrepancy between the dirty water available to orphanages and what was offered just down the street at corporate fast food restaurants and international hotels who placed a priority on clean drinking water given the customers they served.

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Splash founder Eric Stowe.

“That dichotomy, the absolute black and white between what a hotel and restaurant had and what these orphanages had — it was abhorrent,” he recalled.

While meeting with the caregivers at orphanages and clinics, Stowe also did an unprofessional audit, asking what a relief agency could provide that would actually help. Having clean water was a common answer.

With this in mind, Stowe spent a few years helping implement clean water systems at the orphanages he worked with by tapping into the same distribution supply chains that companies like McDonald’s were using. Suppliers would give a 65 percent price break to the orphanages, who then only needed to worry about installation and basic upkeep of the filtration systems.

“It was just leveraging what already existed and not trying to re-create everything from scratch,” Stowe explained.

But by 2007, Stowe realized that this model could be applied elsewhere in the same cities — specifically, in schools. He had big ambitions, and Stowe soon made the leap months later by launching Splash.

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Initially, Stowe did everything on his own in true startup fashion — he built a website, wrote grants, produced videos. He was also still helping the adoption agency, while raising his 2-year-old son.

“I don’t remember a lot of the first year,” Stowe said.

But by 2010, Stowe had staff in the U.S. and abroad. Splash was growing, and it was helping set up water filtration systems at hundreds of organizations while also — perhaps more importantly — providing education in regard to maintaining proper hygiene and sanitation.

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Inside a water filtration manufacturing facility. Photo via Splash.

“It’s quite easy to clean the water,” Stowe noted. “It’s incredibly hard to provoke behavior change around hand-washing or cleanliness.”

Yet a few years later, Stowe had another epiphany. Splash, formerly known as A Child’s Right, had set out to serve 1 million kids in 16 countries by 2020 and become a large charity with a massive global footprint.

But with a $4 million annual budget, Stowe knew his charity couldn’t effectively manage not only what was already going on with its existing operations, but also expand to more cities.

Splash was acting like a traditional charity with an aid mentality, Stowe explained, rather than leaving a permanent change.

“We started to focus on the quality of product rather than the quantity of product,” he said of the mindset shift. “You can’t spread yourself in 16 countries and be a small NGO and see real change.”

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At Splash HQ in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

So Stowe decided to place an emphasis on helping more kids in fewer cities. Now, Splash plans to be in three countries by 2020, but it still has its sights set on helping more than 1 million children.

That means the organization will leave more than half of the countries it currently operates in — and that’s exactly what Stowe wants to see.

“We want to leave projects and systems in place so they can continue on without us,” he said. “We try to build out local government support and give the skill-sets to people there so we can slowly exit the country gracefully and have the local system intact.”

The Splash strategy.
The Splash strategy.

This is a departure from a traditional international charitable model of implementing the same system over and over again in different locations. Splash, which has 15 employees in Seattle and another 50 internationally, is taking a much more case-by-case approach, spending enough time with each school, orphanage, and clinic so that whatever is built can last indefinitely rather than placing a temporary band-aid on existing problems.

This strategy doesn’t allow Splash to quickly expand across the globe. It doesn’t let the organization tout impressive metrics about the number of cities or countries served.

More importantly, though, it enables the charity to build something that can become sustainable for every child in a given city.

“It’s like a book,” Stowe explained. “We’re chapter 1, but by the time someone is at chapter 10, we are a no name entity — and that is really exciting.”

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