There are 748 million people in the world living without access to clean water. Let's change that.

Dear Friends and Colleagues New and Old from Around the World,

I went full time on my software business in August 2012. I saved everything I could before that. I was prepared to put everything I had in the world into the business before I would quit. I lost half of my savings over the course of 13 months before it started to slowly tick back up.

This month, I've finally surpassed my previous net worth in liquid assets from when I was working. It's coming up on 3 years of work to get back to where I was. But, what I have now is a valuable business to show for it, which isn't in this calculation.

It was scary to be an employer for the first time and watch thousands of dollars being shipped out from your bank account every month with not nearly enough money coming in.

Looking back, I think I've been very lucky to bottom out at 13 months while bootstrapping. The world has been more than fair to me.

I am very grateful to the opportunities that were made possible by my mom's hard work in immigrating to this country. I just think what a luxury it is to have the opportunity to pursue my dreams and take risk, and to be lucky enough to face the problems I faced in building a business and the satisfaction of overcoming them.

This past year, I moved to southern California. The weather here is always beautiful, and I constantly remind myself just how lucky I am to be alive in this country, with all the freedoms and conveniences at my fingertips.

In most of the world, these dreams cannot exist. Potential disease from dirty water governs their thoughts, and the world has not been fair to these less fortunate.

This year, I am once again giving up my birthday for Charity Water in hopes of giving the gift of clean water to more people who need it.

It’s a little something I’d like to do once a year to give back to our human race, and I hope you’ll help me do it again.

I started my first birthday campaign 3 years ago. Here are the previous 2 campaigns:
https://my.charitywater.org/tom-fang-birthday-campaign-2013 https://my.charitywater.org/tom-fang-birthday-campaign-2014

And we’ve finally got some results back from the first one.

The project was completed on last month, March 2015. The water project is a “piped water system tap stand”. It is located in a rural community in Rwanda and is providing clean, safe drinking water to 120 men, women, and children.

I can’t begin to imagine the joy of each and every one in that community to receive a gift like that. For me, water is at most a split second, ephemeral thought, and any urge is immediately eviscerated by the seemingly unlimited stream of filtered water from my refrigerator.

With that water project, women and children no longer have to spend hours a day to retrieve dirty water that’s always at risk of deadly diseases. That project cost about $25,000, and I feel incredibly proud that we were responsible for 1/25th of it.

Here’s all the information on the water project, including exact GPS coordinates of the project and every other birthday campaign that contributed:

https://my.charitywater.org/p/myprojectsview?project_id=RW.WFP.Q3.13.147.055&campaign_id=36848

Please join me in giving the great gift of water again by donating a minimum of $28, my age in dollars.

My birthday is on May 8th, and I am hoping to exceed $1,000. It would make me so genuinely happy if you could help me reach that goal.

Thank you for reading, and my gratitude in advance.

Sincerely,

Tom Fang

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P.S. If you contribute to my campaign, you can count on me contributing to your Charity Water birthday campaign :)

P.P.S Every penny (yes, 100%) of your contribution will go directly to the water projects on the ground.

If you're not familiar with Charity Water, they don't use any of your donations to cover overhead. The operational expenses are from private donors, foundations and sponsors to cover everything from staff salaries to basic office systems to office rent and supplies.