The Odyssey To Bring Clean Water To Everyone: How Matt Damon And Get Blue Are Inviting Brands To Help

Water.org is a global nonprofit co-founded by Gary White and Matt Damon that brings safe water and sanitation to families through small, affordable loans.

Water.org

Ninety million people. That is how many lives Water.org — the global nonprofit co-founded by Gary White and Matt Damon to bring safe water and sanitation to the world — has already reached with safe water access. Not through wells, not through aid, but through an idea that White had to spend years convincing banks to believe in. The idea was simple: if a family living without running water is already paying for it — to a vendor, or in hours of daily walking — then they have the capacity to repay a small loan that brings a pipe or a pump directly into their home. The loan gets repaid at a 98% rate, that money flows back into the system, and the next family gets their turn.

I asked Damon what his recent experience playing Odysseus gave him for this monumental challenge of bringing clean water into everybody’s lives. "That it's a long journey. You know, his was 20 years, and I'm 20 years in now myself, and it's ongoing. So I guess he's a good primer for the beginning of the mission, but the mission is ongoing. Gary's been at it quite a bit longer than I have, so Gary's nearing 40 years doing this."

White had been refining that model for nearly two decades when Damon came across his work and reached out. The two co-founded Water.org, and together quietly rewrote how the world thinks about water access. White once did the math on what would have happened had they stuck with traditional well-drilling. It would have taken 600 years to reach the 90 million people they have helped so far.

Six hundred years. That number says less about the size of the problem than about the inadequacy of the old answers. Now, with a goal of reaching more than 200 million people by 2030, White and Damon are reaching for something bigger still — a way to bring the mainstream in.

A Model Built to Scale

Launched on June 9, 2026, Get Blue is a global movement co-created with founding partners Gap Inc., Starbucks, Amazon, and Ecolab, with TikTok, AccuWeather, and Ripple joining shortly after. The initiative is designed to turn daily habits — buying a hoodie, ordering a drink, streaming a playlist — into meaningful impact for families who still spend hours each day without access to safe water at home.

The inspiration is Product Red, the consumer fundraising platform co-founded by Bono in 2006 that proved everyday purchases — a t-shirt, a coffee, a phone — could mobilize serious capital for a global health crisis, channeling hundreds of millions of dollars toward the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. White and Damon saw the same architecture as a model for water, and reached out to Bono before launching. "We had a great conversation with him and he blessed it — go for it with Get Blue," White said. "It's great to have that experience base to draw on."

But Get Blue is not simply that model applied to water. The financial engine underneath it — Water.org’s microfinance approach — means that every dollar raised does more than it appears to. When a loan is repaid, it doesn't disappear. It funds the next loan. And the more people Water.org reaches, the further each dollar goes. "It's a beautiful story," White said, “repeated now almost 17 million times.”

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