This article was originally published by Auburn Magazine.

The foundation of all life on our planet, water is a hard-won luxury in the world’s poorest regions. One group of Auburn alumni is working to change that, including several Harbert graduates at neverthirst, by bringing clean water to communities in some of the most impoverished areas of Africa and Asia.

The water hole

They came to a pit in the rugged wilderness of Ethiopia and looked down. A long line of women and girls—exhausted, malnourished, some old and some still children—each made the treacherous climb down the muddy embankment of the chasm. There, they scooped into worn plastic jerrycans their most desperately needed but scarcest of all resources—water.

It was the same four-hour journey they had made the day before and would make again tomorrow. One their mothers and grandmothers had made from their impoverished rural village for generations. While the men and boys worked other jobs, they gathered this cloudy, mud-colored rainwater from the only source around and carried it home.

It was the first time Tara Collins (’14 marketing) witnessed the struggle for water in person. A globally minded activist since high school, she’d successfully run for the 2013 Miss Auburn on a platform of improving access to clean water around the world. But even with the knowledge that this daily routine was essential—so essential, in fact, that it prevented girls and women from attending school or holding jobs—seeing it firsthand was heartbreaking.

“I knew it would be moving, but being there yourself, there’s nothing like it,” said Collins. “They would send the youngest girls who were most agile down to the bottom so they could climb down and not fall. They would get the water—each jerrycan weighs 40 pounds—and they’d haul it up to the next woman.”

But as the former marketing director for the international nonprofit neverthirst, she had come to do more than observe. Collins was part of a group monitoring the progress of a nearby drilling project that, once completed, would deliver clean water directly from underground aquifers to the local village.

“You’re standing there seeing the problem, but behind you, you’re seeing the drillers. They’re about to get clean water. [You know] these girls’ stories are about to change” said Collins of ending a generational cycle of poverty and deprivation. “You get to see the gravity of the need, but the hope of what you’re a part of.”

Sweat and survival

It will surprise some to know the origins of neverthirst are intertwined with personal fitness. In 2008, Forrest Walden (’98) was selling his stake in a regional fitness franchise and contemplating his next move. A former Auburn Mic Man and exercise science major, he had not yet launched Iron Tribe Fitness, the hugely popular group exercise gym with franchises all across the Southeast, and felt compelled by God to help the less fortunate.

While on mission trips with his church, Walden recognized a recurring issue affecting the most blighted communities was lack of access to clean water.

 

“Over and over, everywhere we went, we kept seeing water as the most basic resource that wasn’t being met,” said Walden, co-founder of neverthirst. “The vision was always, whatever we do, whether it was water [or not], it was do it in the name of the church. That’s what our board got behind, that’s what our donors get behind, they love that message of not only water but the living water found in Christ.”

In December of 2008, Walden, with friends Spencer Sutton and Mark Whitehead, completed a water access project in South Sudan to an overwhelmingly grateful response. The trio founded neverthirst in 2009 as a way to channel outside fundraising directly into impoverished communities, creating not only access to water but jobs, economic stability and the kind of transformational change that has eluded these places for ages.

“A village elder looked at me and said, ‘We’ve been praying for many years and really felt like God had forgotten about us, but because you’re here, we know God answers prayer’,” said Walden. “That was our first project, and that started everything.”

Not long after founding neverthirst, Walden cofounded Iron Tribe Fitness, but he intended from the very beginning to connect the two. That led to the creation of “Workout for Water,” an exercise-course-as-fundraiser with a $50 entry fee that to date has raised nearly $6 million for neverthirst’s water intervention projects.

From donation to drinking water

Neverthirst CEO Matt Letourneau (’01 mass communications) himself learned of the organization from working out at Iron Tribe Fitness. Letourneau had served as executive director of Atlanta Navigators, which focused on development in under-resourced urban communities, before launching Letourneau Consulting LLC to help nonprofits and for-profits “master the relationship between business strategy and human capital.” But neverthirst seemed to crystallize his interests and professional goals like nothing else.

“I didn’t know anything about the water crisis when I prepared to interview with the organization, but my heart was really [broken] seeing the images and reading the statistics of how unbelievably pervasive this is in the world, and that it’s fixable,” said Letourneau. “This is a solvable problem.”

The company’s process is to identify a local partner in a community that needs water, then partner with a local drilling business and manage the project to completion. Drilling partners undergo a rigorous, 32-step vetting process in exchange for training and funding.

Once construction is finished, water samples are tested in a government lab to ensure safety, while Water Use Committees created by community members handle the maintenance and repair funds for the water pumps and solar panels that power them. At nearly all phases, neverthirst’s “water intervention projects” are facilitated by the community, fostering not only self-reliance but pride as well. To date, the company has served more than 1.5 million people.

“[We] help get them the resources that they need to create jobs, create a plan, create economic development through bringing their own people clean water,” said Letourneau.

Going with the flow

“I heard about neverthirst at church—it was probably like ’09—and I was compelled by it. I just love the linear nature, pick one thing and just be excellent at it,” said neverthirst CFO Conor Gallagher (’94 finance). “It was water and gospel, and I love that.”

Gallagher and his wife started as donors a year after neverthirst founded, and were invited by Chief Development Officer Brandon Gossett (’99 management) to go on a donor engagement trip to Cambodia in 2014. “Obviously I was just kind of blown away by it, after writing all the checks and finally getting to go see it,” said Gallagher.

A former senior vice president for Regions Bank, Gallagher took a second trip to Nepal in 2017 before joining neverthirst full-time in 2022. On that trip to Nepal, they came to a village on the Indian border where a girl was digging in a dry riverbed. Barely deep enough to reach surface water, it was one of the primary water sources for the flat, arid desert in the mountains.

With no accessible groundwater, neverthirst tapped a clean mountain spring and laid pipe down the Himalayan foothills to a bio-sand filtration system nearby—one of the many ways they look for solutions that fit the geography and location.

In places with plenty of rain like Cambodia, a $400 filter eliminates most harmful pathogens, but in arid Sub-Saharan Africa, water intervention projects need large teams to install solar-powered pumps hundreds or thousands of feet below the surface. Holding tanks are built to gravity-feed water miles away to village centers. The further they move into more complex intervention projects, the greater the need for fundraising, said Gallagher.

The biggest splash

Nearly 15 years into its mission, neverthirst now hosts partner workshops like one in Cambodia earlier this year to learn from one another and improve their capabilities, a testament to the growth of its global network of community support systems.

The company finished a five-year plan with partners in Nepal, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Chad, India and Niger, and is exploring opportunities in more countries if they can secure the funding.

Already, they’re projecting $100 million in potential water programming over the next five years, fueled in part by major gifts like the one Southeastern Conference President Greg Sankey made in 2022 for his 25th wedding anniversary that funded clean water for an entire community.

The real impact is felt not just in water usage, however, but in the ways that water access changes lives. Children are able to attend school. Mothers can work jobs and care for their homes. Sanitation increases lead to a decline in sickness and disease. The risk of human trafficking goes down while economic opportunities increase. One by one the dominoes all begin to fall.

“If you are the type of person who likes bang for your buck and stretching a dollar—if you care about trafficking, if you care about wellness and health, if you care about education—clean water [does] all that,” said Letourneau. “You’re just giving clean water, but really you’re doing all of those things just by giving them that one resource.”

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Auburn University’s Water Work

The Plains has its share of water advocates. Here are a few making a difference.

- Students for Clean Water raises funds for the manufacturing of bio-sand water filters for neverthirst to distribute to families lacking a potable water source.

Learn more about Students for Clean Water

 

- AU Water Resource Center facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty and staff on water-related research, outreach and instruction.

Learn more about the AU Water Resource Center

 

- Engineers Without Borders USA is a student-run organization that works with communities in developing countries to promote sustainable engineering solutions.

Learn more about Engineers without Boarders