Clean Water through Crowdsourcing | WiserEarth Blog
The typical rural village in the Global South has a population of 1,000 people. That means in order to reach 200 million people you would need to do 10,000 projects a year. Jin Zidell, founder and chairman of the Blue Planet Run Foundation, doesn’t want to fundraise and staff a huge organization to do this, instead they are going to rely on networks. As he explains: “If we can save 20% because we don’t have a large staff, that’s 20% more money going to the work on the ground.” The key to their plan is the Peer Water Exchange (PWX), a “unique participatory decision-making network of partners, [which] combines people, process, and technology to manage water and sanitation projects around the world – from application, selection, funding, implementation, and impact assessment.” Here are the key elements of the system their organization has developed. They turn the typical nonprofit functions on their head:
