W4W+Hurley+Nike = GameChanger Kit (Phase 2) from Waves For Water on Vimeo.

We always feel good about giving the gift of clean water. In my opinion, water is a god given right – like air…

But the fact that there are still such staggering statistics, such as – 1 out of 6 people do not have access to clean drinking water – means there is obviously a hole in the equation. I say it all the time, but there is absolutely no reason that ANYONE should die from dirty water when solutions, like the simple water filtration devices we use, exist. So our primary goal has been to fill that hole by simply connecting the brilliant technology that already exists with the people who need it. It’s nobodies fault, there’s just missing links in the chain sometimes. In this case, the gifted minds who created this incredible technology did their job perfectly – they created user-friendly devices that can make almost any contaminated water, potable. But it isn’t necessarily their job to identify the individuals around the world who so desperately need them… or be the ones to deliver them for that matter. And the folks around the world who are in such dire need solutions like this, don’t have the slightest idea that they exist. That’s where we come in… and on behalf of W4W I will say we are honored to play a roll, of any size, in the big vision that so many people around the world share, which is – clean water for everyone!

I am very proud that we as individuals can always do our part in this fight… and make a difference one person at a time. Actually, it is inspiring to know that one person can provide a hundred people with clean water by putting just one filter in their luggage the next time they travel. This concept was obviously the inception for our Clean Water Couriers program – which, at this point, has legitimately turned into a movement. I like fantasizing about the one for one model – each of us individually doing our part to help one another, with the end result being a complete eradication of the problem. It really is the strength in numbers philosophy and I do believe it CAN be done. And when it is… the credit will not be be shared by a few, but equally with everyone that did their part, big or small.

That said, there are ways to speed up the process and one of the best is to form solid partnerships with other individuals, organizations, corporations, or groups who simply share the same passions for correcting the number of imbalances we face in the world today – in this case: clean water. Whether it’s a merger of large groups or one person doing their part, the fundamentals stay the same – what separates the two models is scale. For example, through our partnership with Hurley more people around the world have clean water – period. Without a partnership of this nature we would still be happily powering away, but the scale would be dramatically different. During our last trip to Haiti proof of this point was made very clear.

We went down to complete phase 2 of the GameChanger Kit project we launched last fall. The original concept for this project was simple: sport + water = GameChanger Kit. We decided that everyone in the communities we target obviously need (and benefit from) clean water… but we felt by adding a sport element into the equation it could, at the very least, provide them with a much needed escape from all the other incredibly hard problems they face each and everyday. Soccer, being the most universally played sport in the world, was the obvious choice. So for this project, in addition to the normal water filters we include, each bucket contained a soccer ball (and little cones to mark the field). We piloted the project in last Sep by distributing kits to two small villages in the Leogone area (epicenter of earthquake). The results were priceless… it was the first time since I started doing this work that all I thought of at the end of the day was the sound of children laughing. People are always grateful when we provide them with clean water, but in giving them an opportunity to participate in a playful activity such as soccer, truly was a game-changer for them… and for us!

The power of collaboration… is a beautiful thing! This time around, we provided access to clean water and sport to 80,000 people – That’s the scale I’m talking about! I feel incredibly lucky to have partnered with such committed and conscious partners as Nike and Hurley on this project… and furthermore, the partners on the ground that helped us get these kits into the communities that needed them most: Fritz Pierre-Louis, who really is the backbone of so much that we do in Haiti… and GOALS, a great grass roots organization that helped distribute the kits throughout their soccer driven community programs across the country.

I have reached a conclusion through the countless projects we participate in across the globe, that to correct the imbalances of the world we must first make the choice to do our part… but ultimately, the battle will be won by us joining hands and fighting together…

Attached are some of the images I shot with my phone during this project… but for a more comprehensive viewing, please see this amazing video shot and edited by Tom Aiello – http://vimeo.com/27752717

Thanks!
Jon

The beneficiaries of the GameChanger kit

Boy filling his cup from W4W filter and other boy drinking filtered water

Boys filling cup from W4W filter system

Families Getting filter system demo

Family on Moto with their new W4W filter system

Fritz and Tom DeBlasis handing out soccer ball to kids after Filter demo

Kids chasing new soccer ball from GameChanger Kit

Kids waiting while clean water flows into their cup

No rules on the soccer field

The Godfather Jack Rose showing kids the GameChanger Kit

Woman walking home with new W4W filter system

Christian Troy and Jordan Tappis revisit Pakistan on behalf of Waves For Water.

Pakistan’s floods of Summer 2010 were rated by the United Nations as the greatest humanitarian crisis that the UN has ever faced. And although it measured such magnitude, the disaster went largely unnoticed by the international community.

The UN expressed concern that aid was not arriving fast enough, and the World Health Organization reported that ten million people were forced to drink unsafe water.

Waves For Water responded. We overlooked the politics and the threats and focused on the human crisis. Within a month, we raised funds, shipped water filtration systems, and arrived in Pakistan to find partners in country to combine efficiencies for optimizing distribution of clean water to those in need.

Christian Troy gives a demo on water filter installation

Distributing water filtration systems in the rural Layyah District of Punjab, Pakistan

Waves For Water filtration system in use

A Pakistani farmer drinks clean water to the last drop before he raises his dry tin cup and smiles

A couple of beneficiaries acknowledge the camera after the one on the left recited an original poem of gratitude

As it turns out, any other color bucket may have just blended in…

These two bespectacled brothers left us with an indelible image of radiant, red buckets being carried off into the farmers’ fields

Read more about Project Pakistan

HLN Interview with Jon Rose from Waves For Water on Vimeo.

Amazon from Waves For Water on Vimeo.

View Article  and Photos from Amazon Part I

Surfer Jon Rose Talks Waves For Water: MyFoxLA.com

Los Angeles – Professional surfer turned environmentalist Jon Rose’s non-profit organization “Waves for Water” goes all over the world bringing clean water technology to places where water is very difficult to come by.

On Monday Jon who just got back from a trip to the Amazon, talked to us about his group on GDLA.

Professional Surfer Jon Rose on GDLA: MyFoxLA.com

Los Angeles – A month after the killer quake and tsunami hit Japan the area was rattled again by a huge 7.1 aftershock.

On Monday professional surfer and founder of “Waves for Water,” Jon Rose joined us live to talk about his organization, which is helping to bring clean water to Japan and other regions affected by natural disasters.

W4W + Haiti 2011 from Waves For Water on Vimeo.

Pamela Anderson supports Waves for Water on the Ellen Degeneris show Feb, 24, 2011.

W4W HAITI Oct 2010 from Waves For Water on Vimeo.

Waves For Water founder, Jon Rose and Surfing icon, Rob Machado team up in Haiti to bring people clean drinking water.

W4W video teaser from Jon & Rob’s trip – filmed & edited by Tom Aiello (Hurley International).

W4W / Nike – GameChanger Kit from Waves For Water on Vimeo.

Well… back in Haiti and since I was here just a week ago its safe to say everything is a bit blurry.

It’s weird now though, I’m starting to feel more relaxed here than at home. I have felt a lot of things since my first mission here, but relaxed has never been one of them. I think because when I’m here I am focused on just one goal and at home I am coordinating more like ten. This last week at home was extra intense due to our recent commitment to launch a project for the flood victims in Pakistan. It’s a beast of a project and on top of our ongoing Haitian and Indonesian initiatives it is a lot to handle. That said we have great individuals stepping up to help… and frankly the result will be a lot of people, in a lot of places, getting access to potable water.
This trip down here is an exciting one… For months now, I’ve been working on a few projects for Haiti that are all seeming to climax now. This one in particular is a pilot project that I started to develop with Nike a few months after the quake. They sent down a few delegates to scout out some programs that they could potentially get behind. Because of my Hurley partnership (Hurley is part of Nike Inc), the delegates were pointed in my direction as a resource once they were here. Short story long, one of the delegates, Tom De Blasis, and I began talking about a way to combine my water program and their interest in sport based community programs. We felt that the bare essentials for survival were health & happiness, i.e. water & sport. The result is a concept called the “Game Changer Kit” – a first response kit (combining our filtration system with a sport element) that we intend to pilot in Haiti, and then implement around the world. The kit is based off our existing two-bucket filtration system that normally includes one filter/spigot/sock… but now also includes, a tarp & rope for catching rain, a soccer ball (deflated), cones (to mark the field), and a ball pump. To top it off, the ball pump also doubles as a pressurization tool for the filter… it mounts to a little hose on the filter bucket to create manual pressure that triples the flow rate of the existing gravity fed method.
So Tom and I worked on this concept for the past few months are finally bringing it to life on this trip! We made 30 sample kits and will be distributing them this week to two small communities in Leogane (quake epicenter)… through one of my existing networks – Thank you Fritz!!
By the time we actually give a filter system to a family in need there is so much that has gone into getting it there. So many steps and hurdles to overcome just to get this simple solution into their hands and I really want to take this moment to thank the special individuals along the way that help to make this a reality. At the end of the day we can all stand together and say that we contributed towards giving the greatest gifts of all – Health & Happiness!
Attached are a few pics from of the kit’s just after we assembled them and also the logo that Tom came up with for the project.

The Nike Game Changer Kit

What is the definition of a game changer?

For me, it is the moment when a significant shift is made in what seemed to be a certain fate. It is a new direction… a new path.

We just finished the distributions of our sample Game Changer Kits to two small villages in Leogane. The first one we went to was a little refugee outpost on the beach… and the second was a little mountain village that was only accessible by driving up a riverbed (pending rain of course!) with a 4×4 vehicle.

The state of things in Haiti is still as bad as ever. It doesn’t matter where I go – the center of Port-au-Prince or a rural village in the North that was virtually untouched by the quake… It’s all incredibly gut wrenching. The sheer magnitude of despair is mind boggling. People are existing under such extreme circumstances and bearing witness to it always dwarfs any sense of strength I may think I have. The truth is, I can only feel an emotion related to what I see. I have no real clue what it’s like to experience this way of life. My decisions are more like WHAT am I going to eat, not IF I’m going to eat. When I’m thirsty I reach into my bag at will and grab my water bottle. They are huddled around a broken pipe that is spurting water that they think is clean… what they don’t realize is that all the pipes are fractured under ground, including the sewer lines. You do the math! Their kids are malnourished and riddled with skin disease because they can’t properly bathe. To top things off, the rains have come… and are relentless… everyday, they soak the makeshift tents that these people call home. Overall sanitation challenges are incomprehensible.

Really, I could go on and on about the everyday challenges with their basic survival. I will spare you. I am just very impacted with all of this, yet again. I have felt all of these things in past trips but over the last few months down here I have been in development mode, with projects such as this GameChanger Kit concept, and my tunnel vision has kept my emotions somewhat at bey. But this trip was climactic, in that we were able to give two small communities the gift of water and sport. It feels obsolete to think that we only gave a few hundred people these things but I also guarantee each of them would disagree with me. It is this math that tends to stifle any sense of accomplishment I have… it has been this way for me since day one.

Contents inside the Game Changer Kit.

So, back to the game changer… I had a breakthrough on this trip that changed my path down here. I know that bringing people water is an incredible gift… a true game changer. But by adding the soccer element with these kits really changes the community dynamic. There is an innocent excitement that you just don’t get with giving water, food, or shelter. Those things are SO needed but they are still reminders of how challenging their lives are. The soccer is a step through the doorway of their shattered existence, to a new place where the weight of the world is not on their shoulders. It is a much needed departure filled with camaraderie, union, and laughter.

I come from a sport background… and that foundation has always been and continues to be my north star. So even though I am most likely the worst soccer player on earth, I can very much relate with their passion. And though food, water, and shelter is the obvious framework for survival, I honestly believe that a community based activity such as sport is the vehicle that will pull them through the hard times.

We need something to bring us together… and sometimes we just need a healthy distraction from the everyday challenges we face.

I’m so proud of this project… and I have a new found respect for ANYONE who can play soccer well!!

Jon