We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Georgia Evans a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Georgia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

I recently visited a remote Maasai village in Tanzania. I had raised money to buy tools to give the villagers that would improve their health. These tools included several community style clean water filters as well as bucket style clean water filters for each home. These water filters last about 5 years and prevent common waterborne illnesses like the deadly cholera, E.coli, dysentery and giardia diseases. We also distributed one or two mosquito nets to each hut to hang over their beds to prevent malaria. This is a major killer of children ages 5 and under.
And we gave each hut a large heavy-duty tarp to cover the thatch roofs so the family can stay warm and dry during the monsoon rains.
After our team passed out these supplies and demonstrated how to use everything, the village chief came up to me and asked my translator, “How did this woman know that we needed these things so badly? No one, not even the government has ever helped up us.”
I remember that I did not know how to answer this question. I still do not know how to tell this kind man that this is a world wide problem and that I have traveled a lot and learned about this.

Georgia, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My journey began in 2016 when I had joined a group of wildlife photographers to go on a photo safari in Tanzania, Africa. Our group plan included a day to visit a Massai village and we were encouraged to bring some gifts for the villagers or for the one room school, So, I researched that topic on the internet and saw a photo of Massai women carrying water buckets on their heads with a nasty looking pond behind them.
Something just went off in my brain that said, omg, these women are hauling that filthy unsafe water back to their children and families to drink. I thought there has to be something I can take to help them make their water clean and safe to drink.
After more research I ordered a couple large community size clean water filters and had them shipped to Tanzania to meet me at my hotel. Many of my family, friends and business friends chipped in to help me buy these thru an online crowd fund me site.
I remember the chief was absolutely thrilled to hear about these tools because he walked almost 5 miles to meet us at the highway and then wanted to sit next to me in the van. For the next 2 hours we worked on trying to understand each other so his people could use these clean water filters. We laughed and pointed and demonstrated our thoughts the best we could. He held my hands and thanked me profusely on our departure that day. Smiles break all kinds of language barriers. Smiles truly are a universal language.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

So, my journey has grown and I have visited 20 more villages plus a small town and an orphanage. There were also several visits to go by and see how past villages were doing with their supplies. Sadly, I found that only a few of the larger community size clean water filters were still in use. Talking about the problems I saw that the handle on the filter, that the villagers needed to use to clean the water filter every few days, was often the culprit that broke. Evidently the villagers would get pump this handle too many times until it jammed or broke. Try as I might it was just too complicated to leave with them.
My workaround has become a much simpler, more affordable solution that benefits more family homes.
We have been distributing bucket style water filters to each head woman who has a house of her own. We teach the head woman how to assemble the filters and maintain them. One filter per home.
We are only giving the community size water filters to schools and very controlled circumstances where the chiefs wife watches over the usage.
Our current goal is to put one in 100 homes on each trip, PLUS one or two mosquito nets, a waterproof roof tarp and a solar lantern for each home.
This has proven to be mostly a woman’s project as the women build the homes and are in charge of the family. However, we also will help single men who are in charge of a home or the young teen warriors who often live alone together in a house that their mothers build.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Funding this International Project has been the most challenging aspect of the project. Luckily several clubs and groups heard about my trip and stepped forward to do some amazing fundraisers where the money the members raised totally funded one or more trips.
I tried as many different kinds of methods to reach people as possible. In 2019, I received quite a few grants from several service clubs that care about serving those less fortunate in other countries.
Then, I turned my “Into Africa” project into a public international non-profit mainly so that donors could get tax deductions and that helped bring in more donors.
Several crowd funding sites were set up and promoted thru social media for people to donate to.
I am also a wildlife and travel photographer, so I began doing public presentations at museums as well as private group presentations to clubs, groups, stem schools and churches to share the story and images. These presentations have lots of photos that really help visualize what these trips are doing. My African photos were sold at all of these presentations (except schools) to raise money. 100% of the sales from these African images goes to fund the Village Care Project.
Donation links and my photos are all posted at the website VillageCareProject.com website.
Quite a few newspapers did big articles with photos that helped spread the word and raised awareness to bring in more donations.
In the past we also had 4 volunteers join us to help the villagers and have 5 more coming on our next April 2024 trip.
These days, it takes all of these methods, and more, to keep a project alive and growing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://villagecareproject.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MessagetoVillageCareProject
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/VillageCareProject-95b093196
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/VillageCarePro1

Image Credits
Photos courtesy Village Care Project