Providing clean water to needy people around the world
Program Titles
- Water epidemic: Providing clean water & sanitation around the world.
- Nearly 1 billion people in the world today lack access to adequate water and 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation.
- The Need for Water…
- Installing water systems
- Expert on the immense power of relationships to transcend perceived barriers
Doc Hendley: Wine To Water – Hero calls himself proof that anyone, even a “tattooed keg-tapper”, can cure what ails the world.
Thunderous applause echoed through the crowd and a humble, grateful smile flashed across Doc Hendley’s face.
Doc Hendley is the epitome of the individual who has made a difference. Tens of thousands of people around the world have clean drinking water they did not have before an idea popped into the head of this “tattooed keg-tapper” musician’s head.
Hendley realized that just by using his ability to tend bar and create relationships with people, he might be able to help the problem. At the bars where he worked, he started raising money to fight this water epidemic the best way he knew how, by pouring wine and playing music.
Hendley has taken personal risks to do the hard work of providing water and clean water education in far flung locations around the globe. He worked in dozens of refugee camps installing water systems for victims of Darfur’s government supported genocide. Often inside the United Nations’ dangerous “no-go” zones, he distributed water or chlorine tablets to people with only plastic sheeting for shelter.
Hendley was named one of the Top 10 CNN Heroes (chosen from over 9,000 applicants by a panel of judges including Gen. Colin Powell, Whoopi Goldberg, Ted Turner and Sir Elton John).
Today Hendley’s Wine to Water foundation aims to help the 1.1 billion people worldwide who lack access to clean water. By using wine events to raise money and awareness about the lack of clean drinking water in the developing world, Doc Hendley has harnessed a powerful social force and multiplied the generosity of many.
Doc is, in essence, turning wine to water for some of the neediest people on the planet for three simple reasons:
1. At least one in six people worldwide lack access to adequate amounts of safe water for drinking and hygiene, according to the UN.
2. Water borne illnesses kill far more children the HIV/AIDS and Malaria combined.
3. Unclean water contributes to diarrhea, the leading cause of illness and death, and translates to 1.5 million preventable deaths each year.
Doc did not dream of dedicating his life to humanitarian efforts in developing countries. Far from it, in fact. He graduated from State University with a communications degree he wasn’t sure how to use.
While bartending to pay the bills, he noticed the men and women sitting on the stools seemed to want to be part of something bigger. Hendley got inspired behind the bar, and today his nonprofit group,
Wine to Water, has dug, repaired and sanitized drinking wells for 25,000 people in five Third World countries. It’s an idea that started with wine tastings and a humble donation jar.
?Each day, millions of the world’s poor lacking the water they need for drinking, cooking and bathing use contaminated water for these purposes.
?Many people in the developing world, usually women and children, walk more than three hours every day to fetch water that is likely to make them sick. Those crucial water fetching hours, prevent many from working or attending school. The poverty cycle continues.
?Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation causes 80% of all sickness and disease in the world. The lack of clean water kills more people every year than all forms of violence – including war.
?Approximately 42,000 deaths occur every week from unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation. 90% of the 42,000 are children under 5 years old. That’s 37,800 children dead each week because a resource like clean water is unavailable to them.
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