Drop of Hope: Water for the World
In 2006, Roots & Shoots U.S.A. sent a group of Youth Leaders to Tanzania to visit the Jane Goodall Institute’s projects and to learn about community based conservation. The Youth Leaders returned to the U.S.A. impressed by what they learned and determined to raise awareness about global water use and accessibility. They pledged to raise funds to provide clean drinking water to the communities they visited. In 2007, they developed the “Drop of Hope: Water for the World” campaign.
Their vision is especially timely. In 2000, the UN Millennium Development Goals committed to raising global drinking water coverage from 77% per cent globally in 1990 to 88.5% in 2015. Data from 1990 to 2002 indicates that this goal is achievable in every country except in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. [1]
The Youth Leaders chose to link their fund raising efforts to an issue closer to home: the excessive use of bottled water and plastic water bottles. They devised a strategy to sell reusable stainless steel bottles to curb the use of disposable plasic bottles, while raising money and awareness for their cause in Tanzania.
According to Take back the Tap, an organization that lobbies to eliminate bottled water, “It takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” [2] In addition, studies have shown that bottled water is not necessarily cleaner or safer than tap water, while costing 100 to 1,000 times more.
The reusable plastic water bottle manufacturer, Nalgene, estimates that on average each person uses 166 plastic, disposable water bottles per year. Through Roots & Shoots’ Drop of Hope: Water for the World campaign we aim to decrease disposable water bottle use by approximately 800,000 bottles by replacing them with only 5,000 completely recyclable stainless steel bottles.
Past Roots & Shoots national campaigns have been extremely successful. The Tchimpounga campaign raised more than $50,000 to fund a new care facility at the Tchimpounga Sanctuary for orphaned chimpanzees in the Republic of the Congo.
The most recent campaign, “Rebirth the Earth” has surpassed its goal to plant 3,000 trees in honor of Dr. Jane Goodall. Groups collected over $15,000 in sponsorships which have gone to build tree nurseries in Tanzania.
The strength of these initiatives lies in the close engagement of youth as decision-makers for the program, as well as in the wide scope of its human reach. Through community and peer-to-peer training in a network of tens of thousands of members, the number of people reached is increased exponentially, developing a population of compassionate, concerned, responsible young people.
[1] http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/mdg1/en/index.html
