While we were out shooting some staff photos today, this enthusiastic skateboarder asked us to take his picture. So, our new friend showed off his skills and ollied over a Jerry can in honor of Tony Hawk’s birthday tomorrow!

campaign: Georgia Spartan Sprint
campaign goal:$5,000
has been fundraising since: April 18, 2012
mission statement: “On March 10th, 2012 we will be running Spartan Sprint in Georgia which is a 4 mile run full of military style obstacles. Sounds rough right? Well, imagine doing all of that without clean water… While the ATL Heroes love doing recreational activities, we wanted to use this opportunity to bless others. Our mission is to raise $5,000 for water. We want every step to matter.”

There are many obstacles that people run into while raising money to provide clean water — but this group of guys chose to deal with even more obstacles than most people might encounter. Tom Chon and friends Chris, Henry, Barney and Ben ran the Spartan Sprint in March. They climbed, ran, crawled and threw… all for clean water! Tom shared with us about their experience:

What inspired you and the team to join the race?
My inspiration for signing up for the race was two fold. One, I really enjoy doing obstacle races like Spartan Race and pushing myself. Two, there has been this mantra that I’ve been learning from a church retreat which is: “Blessed to be a blessing to others.” So I wanted to hit two birds with one stone: run an obstacle race and use this to bless others. And I was trying to get people involved with it.

Did you encounter challenges during the campaign that you may not have expected?
The hardest and easiest part of the campaign was the fundraising. It was hard to try to educate people on why they should care about charity: water and try to convince them… but at the same time there were people who totally got it and would donate a single, large sum. So that was encouraging.

Another hard part was trying to motivate the team to continue to fund raise. Our initial goal was to raise $5K so that we could at least bless one village with a well and we didn’t reach our goal. We are going to run another race and hopefully raise enough money to accomplish it.

What do you feel was an important lesson you learned through this campaign?
One of the biggest lessons I learned was that fundraising is not as easy as it looks (well, for some people). I realized we have to do more than just send an email. Follow up with them, don’t be afraid to ask people, and use all types of media to help fundraise like Twitter and Youtube. Be creative.

Challenge yourself by running an obstacle race, start a club on campus or bake cookies — you can do just about anything to raise funds for clean water! Learn more here >

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Every friday our staff gets together at 5P.M. for beer and pizza to de-compress from the week. Yesterday, our friends Michael Birch and Shakil Khan stopped in. Michael and his wife Xochi sold their social network, Bebo, in 2009 and invested in many cool startups including one young non-profit at the time: charity: water. Michael became our first angel investor, helping us pay for operating costs and staff when we were just a small group of 7. He also helped us get mycharity: water up and running by writing the codebase himself. Shak has introduced us to countless amazing people who’ve now become supporters of the mission, traveled with us to Ethiopia four times, and even did his own fundraising campaign for clean water in 2010. He recently joined PATH, a mobile social network, as their Head of Special Projects.

They’re both incredibly accomplished, but they’re not beneath a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos with our founder, Scott.

campaign: Susquehanna University charity: ball 2012
campaign goal:$5,000
has been fundraising since: April 18, 2012
mission statement: “The first annual Susquehanna University charity: ball, taking place in Evert Dining Hall on April 14th, 2012 at 9pm. Tickets are $20 each and for every ticket sold, one person will get clean water in a developing nation for 20 years.”

Susquehanna University student Brian Maehl is making clean water a top priority while also juggling his studies and activities. Brian started up a charity: water club on campus that fundraises for clean water. This month, the club hosted their own charity: ball. We talked with Brian to hear his thoughts on their mission:

Tell us about the big event — the Susquehanna University charity: ball:
Over 150 people attended the ball, which featured charity: water exhibits, dancing, dessert, a photo-shoot, and a WaterWalk. As of now, we have raised over $3,000! We are also awaiting a sponsorship through a club member connection that will increase our total even more.

One of our exhibits was similar to the Rachel Beckwith exhibit at the NYC charity: ball to honor Rachel and to share her story with Susquehanna. For another exhibit, we were very limited with our options and had to get creative. We filled an aquarium with water and sold glow sticks to guests, with each color glow stick representing a different dollar amount. The guests would put the glow stick in the tank to symbolize their donation to charity: water. We had a few laptops on hand for those that wanted to make donations of more than $20 to the ball campaign.

The WaterWalk got over 250 walks throughout the course of the night, and for every walk, $1 was donated from an outside sponsor to charity: water. Groups of students and faculty members cheered each other on to complete the walks. Whenever the walks hit a monumental amount (50, 100, etc.) a club member would tell the DJ and an announcement would be made all guests.

We also had a slide show running on a large projector screen at the front of the room that showed photos from people in developing nations and shared ways to become involved.

One of the biggest attention-getters of the evening was the photobooth that was run by our amazing event photographer, Tierney Ayers of Tierney Cyanne Photography. Students had an absolute blast taking photos in different poses with the Jerry cans. The photos are still swarming all around Facebook and social media sites, raising awareness for countless people that have viewed the photos and our club Facebook page. We even had our Dean of Students, Student Activities Coordinator, Associate Director of Admissions, and Assistant Director of Residence Life for Student Conduct take photos with Jerry cans!