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Day One, I had the wonderful opportunity of hear Kori Chilibeck, CEO of Earth Water International, speak about his company. If you know anything about social enterprise, EWI is the epitome of it. 100% of their net profit goes directly to the UNHCR (the United Nations Refugee Agency). He currently has offices in Edmonton, in the States, in Amsterdam and in Japan. And the whole concept is based on the most simple idea: bottled water has been marketed to as a luxury item. A lot of people buy it for the sake of buying it, right? So instead of the big shareholders like Nestle or Coca-Cola to continue to get all the profit from consumers like us, he introduces us to Earth Water, which is locally bottled and sold (again, to cut costs), is sold at a relatively affordable price (usually between $1.00 CAD to $2.00 CAD), and all proceeds go directly to people living in Ethiopia or Sedan. So far, over 25 000 have now had access to clean drinking water thanks to the efforts of Kori and his corporation. They have no budget for marketing and advertising, so they rely solely on word-of-mouth. He also has celebrities offering to advertise for him, for free. Within the last year, his company witnessed a 12% growth, which is incredible considering the financial state of the world at present. I guess one of the main reasons of their success is because unlike other NGOs who have a lot of security issues with going into different developing nations, EWI, since only offering clean drinking water, hasn’t had any major issues going anywhere. And then this means that it only costs about $250 CAD to build a sustainable water well for EWI, as opposed to close to $10 000 CAD it might cost any other organizations. Rachelle & I turned to each other at the end of this session and agreed that Evian & Fiji are so High School, and this day and age, everybody should be proud to drink Earth Water! Anyway, I grabbed Kori after the session for a quick interview and here’s what he had to say:
if you have a dream, go for it. just do it. and if it doesn’t pan out, then go sleep for a bit, dream something else, and try it out. my goal for earth water international is to solve the water-crisis in sub saharan Africa, and eventually all over the world. will i accomplish that? guaranteed. and you? you can also do whatever it is that you want, as long as you feel that you can.
Discover Earth Water.
It’s truly refreshing.
