💙WWB eNews: Our 2022 Annual Report💙

January 29, 2023

2022 Annual Report ~ A Year of Many Blessings

In last Sunday’s WWB ENews, we invited you to dream with us as we look forward to growing our mission in 2023. Hang on for a longer E-News, because as promised last week, today we present our 2022 Annual Report -- and even in snapshot form, there’s a lot of good news to share!

As you saw last week, at Water With Blessings we keep a close eye on our quantifiable statistics. When it comes to analyzing and evaluating the year, there are three sets of metrics that, taken together, tell the story of mission success: income, expenses and outputs. But those metrics are not cold numbers. All three sets of data to some degree represent people... and yet so many people have given so much more that can be summed up in those key metrics.

Income

Remember Neil Young’s 1972 hit, “Heart of Gold?” Every day, like Neil, we’re hoping and searching for those hearts of gold to provide the needed income for our mission. This year, we found 444 new donors who opened their hearts to God’s thirsty children. Along with 1022 returning donors, that gives us a total 1466 sources of support: individual donors, churches, schools, charitable organizations, religious congregations, businesses and even other NGOs in our field!

Our cash income, by and large, comes from those many sources. In 2022, we were entrusted with over $1.2 million dollars for Water Women, Navajo families, Eastern Kentucky flood survivors and Ukrainian medics. The gold table provides a breakdown of income relative to our various funding sources.

In-Kind Support

Cash Income can’t begin to account for unquantifiable resources in the form of “in-kind” contributions. We conservatively calculate the nonprofit pricing and special Sawyer PointONE filter donations by Sawyer Products at well in excess of $335,000. Business partners such as Quality Home Products of Texas contributed another $50,000 worth of filters. Navajo Westerners Ace Hardware and Argee Corporation have contributed and discounted hundreds of buckets for the Navajo Nation and Eastern Kentucky. The contributions of time and talent by a host of volunteers are truly immeasurable: untold hours in “filter socks”, filter kit assembly, picking up gently used buckets at various bakeries, transporting filters and supplies to Eastern Kentucky, maintenance and repairs at our headquarters, presentations at clubs and churches, board governance, committee work, events planning and staffing, and more...... only God knows the true value of all this in-kind support!

Mission Expenses

Our mission depends upon two areas of expense, as you can see In the green table: both “direct” and “indirect”. In reality, all expenses go directly to our mission. We can’t do mission well without staff, places to work, communications and all the rest that goes into fund development...in fact, we can’t do mission at all without those areas of expense.

The Challenges of 2022

When we look back at 2022, it’s with deep gratitude, for we made it through some significant challenges. In response to the global economy, affected by war, disease and inflation, our income was not as high as we hoped, and some expenses were higher than we anticipated. On top of that, civil unrest in Haiti, where our mission is most needed in the Western Hemisphere, caused us to temporarily suspend operations over and over. All of that led, for the first time in our history, to indirect mission costs that exceeded our usual healthy 8-12% of total expenses. But we have high hopes for getting back down to healthier levels in 2023 ~ it all comes down to greater numbers of distributions relative to the cost of administration, development and overhead.

~ Outcomes ~

Our Mission Counts!

We can interpret that phrase, “our mission counts” in a couple of ways. We report our “mission counts”, “keeping account of” our mission by tracking filter distributions, whether they be as Water Women, in disaster response or in household water support for US communities. Our data collecting technology (GIS, Geographic Information Systems, managed by Sparrow Data Solutions) enables us to account for every distribution, and to conduct surveys for follow up assessments.

The pie chart is just a snapshot summary of many thousands of data sets collected from the new Water Women, Navajo households and Eastern Kentucky recipients of 2022. (The recipient registrations are just at the place of training; no one is “tracked”!)

On another level, our mission truly counts in the long run... and this too can be quantified to a certain degree. Our Contra-Cholera story map from Haiti is our most stunning mission success story to date: we can confidently proclaim that Water Women are the answer to the challenge of long-range cholera resistance in Haiti -- and waterborne disease there and in every of the other 45+ countries where there are Water Women. In 2023, we plan more story maps and webinars to share similar, though less dramatic outcomes in Honduras and other WWB missions.

At the most granular level, our mission counts in the lives of Water Women, their families and neighbors, as well as other recipient groups. We can and do quantify the changes in household health, through surveys of disease symptoms in recipient households. Less amenable to metrics, we celebrate the impact of empowerment for Water Women, who are elevated by their service to hero status in their communities. And in turn, they lead us back to what counts at the wider scale: their sacred promise to filter for 3 other households besides their own. We spend, on average, $75 per Water Woman -- about twice as much as it would cost to distribute without best practices training and materials...but in turn, we see 4 times the impact per filter.

The bottom line for 2022? Check out the blue chart to see the by-country breakdown of the 16,148 Water Women. Multiplying by 4, we project 64,592 more households impacted in 2022; our average household size data indicates over 271,000 individuals drinking clean water. That’s a lot of God’s thirsty children ~ all thanks to the numbers where we started: 1466 income sources, and about 200 in-kind sources of support. That’s our full circle of support for 2022.

In just a couple of weeks, we’ll be celebrating 15 Years of Water Women in Honduras, where our mission was born in 2008. In those 15 years, 158,283 mothers of many faiths have stepped up to the sacred call of Water Woman service... bringing clean water to over 700,000 households, perhaps 3 Million or more people.

As Water With Blessings, we hold that every one of God’s children, everywhere, every day, should be drinking clean water. Thank you for holding this vision with us... thank you for helping Water Women bring the vision to reality. It all counts. Blessings for that!