We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jacob Niemeier a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jacob, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
During a foreign mission trip in 2011 with a team of students from St. Thomas Aquinas’ Catholic Newman Center at Purdue University, I traveled to Haiti one year after its devastating 2010 earthquake. That experience opened my eyes to some of the world’s biggest challenges—poverty, food insecurity, and the global water crisis. Combined with my studies at Purdue in Agricultural and Biological Engineering with a focus on water resources, this trip ultimately inspired me to respond to a calling from God to one day start Vera Aqua Vera Vita.
One story from that trip still stays with me every time I think back on Haiti:
“I was overwhelmed by the severity of poverty. I watched a woman walk from her tent carrying a bucket to a canal flowing through the city and fill it with water that looked like chocolate milk. Animals were defecating and walking through it, it was visibly full of trash and litter, and people were washing their clothes and dumping waste into it.”
I knew she was going to use that water for her family, and it was very likely going to make them sick—if not kill them. That personal, firsthand encounter with the reality of the water crisis was pivotal. It planted the seed that eventually led me to start Vera Aqua Vera Vita—“True Water, True Life”—and to answer the call to provide clean, safe water to people in need in developing countries.
After graduating from Purdue University in 2012, I accepted a position in Dallas, Texas as a water resources engineering consultant and Engineer in Training (E.I.T.). During that time, I continued to nurture this calling while intentionally building relationships and experience that would one day form the foundation for Vera Aqua Vera Vita.
In 2015, an opportunity arose when friends approached me about a community in the Piura region of Peru that was in desperate need of clean water. As I recall:
“A few members of the pueblo of Monte Castillo had approached my friends asking if they could help them get clean water because their children and elderly were suffering and dying. Immediately, my friends thought of me, because in our social circles I was constantly talking about my desire to work to combat the global water crisis.”
With an enormous amount of prayer, encouragement, and support, that conversation marked the beginning of the journey to officially launch Vera Aqua Vera Vita. Together, we initiated a pilot project to bring clean, safe water to more than 7,000 people in the community of Monte Castillo.
To further solidify my professional credentials, I earned my Professional Engineering (P.E.) license in 2016. Then, on June 13, 2017, Vera Aqua Vera Vita, Inc. was officially established as a nonprofit NGO, formally beginning its mission to bring “True Water, True Life” to the most vulnerable communities in the developing world.
The pilot project in Monte Castillo—the final motivation needed to launch VAVV—began in May 2015 and operations commenced on August 3, 2019, when the newly constructed and tested water treatment plant was commissioned. Since that day, it has provided consistent, reliable access to clean water for the entire community.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I grew up in the heartland of North America, and from a very young age, my Catholic Christian faith has played a central role in my life.
I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in Agricultural & Biological Engineering from Purdue University, and I continue to uphold my Professional Engineering license. Engineering has always appealed to me because of my love for problem-solving and adventure—whether that involves water, the environment, travel, or people.
While at Purdue, I became deeply aware of the needs and suffering of people in developing countries through mission trips to both Haiti and Africa. Those experiences profoundly shaped my worldview and ultimately inspired me to start Vera Aqua Vera Vita.
After graduating from Purdue in 2012, I moved to Dallas, Texas, where I began working with Stantec, Inc. as a water resources public infrastructure consulting engineer. I am a Professional Engineer (P.E.) with more than ten years of design experience on both public and private projects, specializing in water, wastewater, and stormwater conveyance, distribution infrastructure design, as well as water and wastewater system modeling.
In June of 2017, I officially founded Vera Aqua Vera Vita. Since then, I have taken intentional steps to launch the organization, advance its mission, and strengthen its foundation. In May of 2019, I took a leap of faith and committed to Vera Aqua Vera Vita full-time, allowing me to pour more time, energy, and prayer into the mission.
In my faith life, I strive to serve the homeless, spend time in adoration of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, regularly receive the sacraments of the Catholic Church, and remain rooted in authentic Christian community with fellow young adult Catholics.
Outside of my work, I am a Catholic family man who loves spending time with my wife, Fernanda Niemeier, and our growing family. I enjoy keeping up with superhero TV shows and movies, fishing, hunting, hiking, camping, playing basketball, board games, and just about any sport or competition. I also have a strong appreciation for craft beer and, as I like to joke: “Beer = 95% Water | Water = Life | Beer = 95% Life!?!”
At my core, I am a visionary and a big-picture thinker. I am a problem-solver, a change-maker, and a facilitator with a heart for missionary service. I am fun-loving, people-loving, and a faithful, passionate Catholic. Above all, I strive daily to live my life aligned with the words of St. Catherine of Siena: *“If everyone was who God created them to be, then we would set the world ablaze!”*
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
Getting Vera Aqua Vera Vita off the ground was no small feat since it is a 501(c)3, I needed to fundraise our initial seed funding by selling the why, the what, and the how of our vision and then inspiring folks to partner with us and give generously to bring the vision to reality. It very much helped in the early days that we actually had a tangible project to bring clean water to 7,000+ in Monte Castillo, Piura, Peru to show and tell folks how their support was going to directly transform and save the lives of countless people in desperate need of clean water. It is so much easier to sell a vision when you have a real and concrete project that prospective partners can get excited about.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
About 2.5 years ago, Vera Aqua Vera Vita was on the cusp of financial demise because our cash flow (income vs. expenses) was very much in the red despite our best efforts otherwise. It was at that point that I and our Board of Directors decided we could either give up or we could be abundantly transparent about our situation with all of our partners and donors, cast a big vision for transformation, and have candid conversations with our most loyal supporters about our situation and invite them to help us transform our situation and turn from survival mode to thriving mode. So, obviously, being unwilling to give up and accept the status quo, we embarked on a journey to cast a transformational vision of what our organization could look like and the reach and impact we could have 3, 5, and 10 years if we could but just secured the funding and resources we needed to implement what we knew to be a proven model and approach to sustainable clean water systems then we just got to work doing our part and trusting that if it was God’s will that he would bless, sustain, and multiply our efforts which Praise God, he has done abundantly with even more to come!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://veraaquaveravita.org/
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/veraaquaveravita
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/veraaquaveravita/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-niemeier-p-e/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/VerAquaVeraVita
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWxgGXMoVAc3GnAfWqIPWRw?sub_confirmation=1
