Monthlong Online Fundraiser Brings Global Attention To Local Water Issues 

Crowdfunding campaign #TeamWater aims to raise $40 million by the end of August to provide 2 million people around the world with access to clean water. As of Tuesday morning, #TeamWater has raised more than $33 million dollars, $7 million dollars from its goal. 

George McGraw is CEO of DigDeep, one of the campaign’s U.S. partners that works to ensure that every American has access to a working tap and toilet at home.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Schulz: What is DigDeep? 

McGraw: DigDeep is a national nonprofit organization. We’re a human rights nonprofit that works to ensure that every American has access to a working tap and toilet at home. There are several million people in the U.S. without any access to running water at home. So no taps, no toilets. Many of them get water from outside their home, or use some other coping mechanisms to get through the day. 

We’re best known for our community-led field teams like the Appalachia Water Project in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, folks that go out and help households get outfitted with clean running water and proper sanitation, building infrastructure, replacing plumbing, connecting folks to systems. Then we surround that work with policy work, with partnerships, with marketing campaigns, with research, all of the things that we think will help us change the system so that no one in the U.S. has to continue living this way.

Schulz: Why is central Appalachia such a focal point for this work?

McGraw: It’s a major hot spot of water inequity in the United States. Generally, if you look across the U.S., there are places that never had access, places that were left behind by federal investment, or that maybe developed differently than other parts of the country, places like reservations, some rural agricultural areas. But Appalachia is in a different bucket altogether. This is a place that used to be tremendously wealthy and have access to resources, but new pressures like economic shifts and climate change have made the systems fall offline. So the water access that people once had, they no longer have. We work there to restore that access and give people their sort of health and humanity.

Schulz: What is #TeamWater?

McGraw: #TeamWater is a global fundraising campaign. It was launched by YouTube creators MrBeast, one of the most famous YouTube creators in the world, Jimmy Donaldson, and his friend, Mark Rober. They partnered with this international water nonprofit, Water Aid, and with us at DigDeep and others, and it’s a month-long campaign in August that aims to raise $40 million to provide clean running water, or clean water to millions of people worldwide, and clean running water to folks right here in the U.S.

Schulz: You did a great job explaining who MrBeast is. But can you explain to those who are perhaps only hearing that name for the first time why it is such a big deal for an organization like yours and for a public effort like this to have someone like him on board?

McGraw:  MrBeast has one of the most powerful public platforms in the world. He’s an incredibly giant, global, bought-in audience. He probably reaches over a billion people. To have someone with that level of cachet in this global conversation pick up this issue and want to do something about it is, in my mind, an incredible opportunity for us to share our work, our issue, and really put the lives of our clients and the folks we serve front and center.

Schulz: How much progress have you made towards your goal of ensuring everyone in this region of the country has access to water and sanitation, and how will the #TeamWater campaign impact that goal?

McGraw: Our work in that region of central Appalachia is called the Appalachia Water Project, and through that project we currently serve 24 communities across West Virginia and Kentucky. To date, we’ve connected nearly 1,000 residents to working taps and toilets, some of them for the first time. 

One of the challenges of this problem nationally is we have a very high level of idea of how many people are impacted, but we don’t have good, granular local level data on where those folks live, what kind of deficiencies they’re experiencing, or what kind of effort it’s going to take to solve that problem for them. So every time we enter a new community and build a team from within that community, as we’ve done in central Appalachia, that team spends a lot of time going out into neighborhoods, working with local utilities, local politicians, community organizers, homeowners, to understand the problem as it’s being experienced on the ground, and then we build solutions, community by community, to resolve those problems. So in answer to your question like, sort of how much progress have we made? It’s difficult, I think, in places across the United States to understand where the finish line is. So we try to understand where that is on a community by community, sometimes county by county, basis. And I’m really proud of the work we’ve done in Appalachia so far. 

I think that hopefully this attention from this #TeamWater campaign will really jump start that work. I mentioned that MrBeast is like the most followed YouTuber in the world. I think he has more than 400 million subscribers, and he’s really good at storytelling. I think this is probably going to become the largest water awareness campaign in history. It’s got a really audacious goal, obviously, but this is a once in a generation chance to put our U.S. water crisis on the global map and use it to serve folks in central Appalachia, get them the water and sanitation access they’ve never had.

Schulz: Can you tell me a little bit more about #TeamWater’s visit to West Virginia?

McGraw: I was there with MrBeast’s team when they came to visit. They met our staff, our clients. They spent days in the field, watching construction work happen in a couple hollers and neighborhoods, really trying to understand, sort of the hoops people jump through every day just to get enough water to make it through the day, the frustrations, the joys and the wins, too, of what we’ve been able to accomplish with folks. And it was really wonderful to work with them. I think they’re really behind this in a way that I am really impressed by.

Schulz: We’ve talked a lot about connectivity, but accessing clean water to begin with, can often be an issue. How are you all addressing or even looking at that issue?

McGraw: The institutions and agencies we support in this process, like public utility districts, for instance, public service districts (PSD) in West Virginia, they are tasked with producing water that meets a certain quality standard at a federal and state level. And then we help them hook their services into more people’s homes, some of whom have never had running water before, some of whom used to have it and have lost it. In all of that, we’re in close partnership with these PSDs, making sure that they’re delivering water that meets those quality standards to people’s homes every day. 

My big concern around water contamination and water quality is much more around folks who don’t have that access, leaving their home and pulling water off of a mountain spring or out of a mine shaft that might be contaminated with something that they don’t even realize: bacteriological contaminants, chemical contaminants, minerals, and other sort of naturally occurring things that can make one sick but don’t necessarily have a taste or an odor or a flavor. That’s something we keep a close eye on and help the folks that we are serving make sure they have healthy alternatives while we’re building these systems.

Schulz: If there’s anything that I haven’t given you a chance to discuss regarding DigDeep in general, or #TeamWater more specifically, or if there’s something that we touched upon that you’d like to highlight at this time, please do so.

McGraw: I think the really exciting thing about the #TeamWater campaign is that there are many Americans who know that there are water access challenges in other countries, but this raises the awareness that those challenges don’t just exist far away. They exist right here at home, and they’re challenges we can solve together, in fact that we’re solving every day. To have that opportunity, that platform, and be able to center voices from places like central Appalachia, I think is really powerful, and why we’re really excited.