Description
Sip by sip, a worldwide crisis looms.
Imagine brown water, swimming with parasites, oozing from your kitchen faucet. Imagine no faucet at all.
Lack of access to clean water is a looming issue of worldwide concern. Drought, depleted aquifers, and battles over water plague communities across the United States. Globally, more than 884 million people lack access to a safe drink of water, and over 2 billion people lack access to an adequate latrine. In developing countries, people walk an average of three miles each day to collect water, a task which most often falls upon young women and girls. Because they are busy collecting dirty water, these girls miss hours of school, if they attend at all, and upon reaching puberty, many drop out if there is no access to an adequate latrine.
And about every 20 seconds, one of these children die...all because of dirty water. Day in, and day out.
Class by class, a creative solution blooms.
Teachers across the United States are scrambling to instill a sense of global and environmental stewardship among their student bodies. Learning has become a more active pursuit, often coinciding with service to the community.
H2O for Life provides an interactive service learning program which teaches children about global water issues and provides the tools they need to take action and help solve the crisis. Through our program, U.S. schools select a partner school from a developing country that desperately needs water, sanitation, and hygiene education, then commit to raising funds for that partner school. Our innovative school-to-school approach helps young people develop a concern for others by taking a major global crisis and scaling it down to a manageable size; one water project in the developing world. Students not only learn about another country, community, school, and people, but more importantly, they learn that they can make a tangible difference for the students in their partner school.
