The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music]
do you wish you had your own private tutor to help you study for the certified water technologist examination
well now you do so many of you have asked me to help you with the mock cwt
examination and i’ve done that very thing if you go to scaling up h2o.com
forward slash cwt prep again that scaling up h2o.com forward slash
cwt prep you will see that i’ve created a course and i tell you everything i know about
each one of those mock questions it’s my hope that that helps give you the
confidence you need to sign up to get certified today
welcome to scaling up the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems i’m your host trace
blackmore welcome to another episode of the scaling up h2o podcast and nation
happy world water day we’ve been celebrating world water day
since 1993 and the theme today is about groundwater making the invisible
visible groundwater is invisible but its impact is visible everywhere
out of sight under our feet groundwater is a hidden treasure that enhances our
lives almost all of the liquid fresh water in the world is groundwater as climate
change gets worse groundwater will become more and more crucial we need to
work together to sustainably manage this precious resource groundwater is out of sight but it must
not be out of mind happy world water day and while you’re
out servicing your accounts talking to your clients
why not talk about this valuable resource that we have
we’re so fortunate to have a job in which is water and today we’re going to interview
somebody that’s going to have us look at water a lot differently than we are used
to on our regular day today but before we get to that interview
nation next week i will be at the association of water technologies technical training
seminars in cleveland ohio this is one of my favorite events to participate in
i’m one of the trainers i get the fortune to do sales training to do the fundamentals and applications training
and then also teach people about water treatment math it is my super bowl of
being in the water treatment industry i saw a bunch of people back in seattle
just a few weeks ago well we’re going to be in cleveland just next week so
there’s still time to sign up if you have not registered you can go to awt.org or you can go to our show notes
page both of those places will lead you to the right place so you can register and if you are there please please
say hi to me i want to hear your story and i definitely want to meet you
be sure to go to our show notes page to learn about all the events that are
happening maybe one is near you maybe one is one that will get you super
charged on the next thing that you want to learn about nation as always we are thinking on
water especially on world water day here’s james to help us out with that
welcome to thinking on water with james the segment where we don’t give you the answers we give you the topics and
questions for you to think about drop by drop now let’s get to it
in this week’s episode we’re thinking about how saturated brine is then diluted during the softer regeneration
brine draw cycle why is this on the surface it seems oxymoronic to
work so hard to achieve a saturated brine in the brine tank only to dilute it during the brine draw cycle in the
regeneration process what impact would using saturated brine have on the resin beads
operationally why does it make sense to dilute instead of achieving the desired brine concentration up front
you’ve probably not even thought much about this one part of the software regeneration process before
but take this week to think about it in the entire process be sure to follow hashtag tow22
and hashtag scalinguph2o share your thoughts on each week’s thinking on water
i’m james mcdonald and i look forward to learning more from you scott nation i’m really excited to talk
with our guest today here’s our interview
my lab partner today is steve speer of team world vision steve welcome to the
scaling up h2o podcast well thanks trace this is uh this is fantastic being with you all
yeah i’m so excited about today’s interview i just recently learned a little over a year ago about what you
all do and i had the privilege of meeting you personally this past december
so we’re going to talk about all things team world vision but i want to talk about you first because you’re a very
impressive guy you have a a really interesting resume some of the things that you’ve done so do you mind telling
the scaling up nation a bit about yourself well sure i’m happy to and again thank
you for having me and scaling up nation this is just awesome being with you all my name is steve speer i live in the
chicagoland area i’ve been lived here for about 30 years my wife frances and i are coming up on gosh about 36 years of
marriage this june we have a couple children one grandson loved being a grandparent
worked a little bit in the business sector and a lot of times sort of in the church sector if you will and then and
then now in the nonprofit sector so yeah kind of a little bit of this and a little bit of that
and something you shared with me when we met in december was you’re not just a
runner you’re a cross-country literally a cross-country runner what
does that mean yeah yeah probably um when somebody hears cross-country they think oh somebody that ran cross country
in high school or college that kind of thing which i by the way didn’t do but uh in 2013 i ran across the united
states and there’s obviously without a doubt a huge backstory a person usually doesn’t just wake up and go oh i think
i’m gonna run i think i’m gonna run from like the west coast of the east coast there’s a huge backstory behind it and i’m quite honestly the most unlikely
person on the planet to have done it but that being said in 2013 i did um do do
that run across the united states and it was quite quite a journey
now i have to ask did you wake up one morning and say this needs to get checked off my bucket list
no not at all um you know i had prior to 2007
i was a complete non-runner i didn’t run hated running wanted nothing to do with running and a friend of mine in in 2006
actually ran the chicago marathon and did it with world vision it was kind of a fundraising opportunity for clean
water and he did it and it was the very first year that team world vision had a team at a marathon
and it was a new kind of a new startup within the greater family of world vision but my buddy did it the next day
he said oh you need to run this with me next year in 2007 you need to run the chicago marathon and trace i had a
two-letter answer for him which was n-o and it was followed by the phrase i hate
running but over time i felt compelled to step out of my comfort zone and to try this
to do this so i did i ran in 2007 my very first chicago marathon
and i actually had four goals for my first marathon my goal number one was just to hate running less every time i
ran goal number two was to train well enough to make it to the starting line
the third goal was to finish before they closed the course so i didn’t really have high goals at all and then the last
goal was to raise a thousand dollars for clean water for the most vulnerable in the world and to my surprise something
transformative happened in me and that sort of just led me on a journey
which then about five years later is when through a series of events the
decision came based upon prompting to do a run across the united states
now tell us about that because obviously you didn’t wake up one morning and said today’s the day i’m going to start in
california i’m going to end in new york what was that journey like yeah i mean once the moment landed like
after kind of like um running from the i quote no pun intended after running from
the idea of doing this and finally surrendering myself to do it that was in april of 2012 is when i kind of finally
said okay this is gonna happen my wife and i kind of got on the same page okay let’s do this i would run and she was
obviously the number one cheerleader in support of the whole thing it became kind of a process so i ended up
i was on staff at a fairly large church in the chicago area i resigned my position
and it ended up being an 18-month volunteer project for world vision so i was a volunteer for the organization
when i did the run the run itself lasted five months i ran about a marathon a day for 150 days straight but it ended up
being an 18-month project because there was the the planning ahead of the run you know to for all the logistics and
all of that and then of course the run itself and then the you know it was about i
think we took three months after the run to kind of kind of settle things a little bit before figuring out what the next step
of life was going to be but the the actual run itself was five months the stuff on either side of it was just more
kind of logistic ramp up and logistic kind of run down it was definitely something a period of time we’ll never forget
so you shared some of your stats with me it says you started on april 8th of 2013
and you ended on september 6th of 2013.
you ran 3081 miles through 14 states went
through 10 pairs of running shoes and ate over a thousand peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches okay i got to know about the shoes and the sandwiches how do you break in all of those shoes so they
don’t kill you on the race yeah interestingly you know i think when you get used to really a pair of running
shoes that fit you like a glove you can just throw on a new pair and you’re just ready to rock and roll so i kind of knew
exactly the kind of shoe that i needed and asics was very kind to us they were one of our product sponsors which was
great and so very very happy with that and then so yeah there each shoe kind of has
a story obviously i still have all 10 pairs of shoes and each one of them have a story uh for sure
and then yeah the peanut butter and jellies were uh you know i had uh so many food items that became
cravings along the way and but peanut butter and jelly and those were like we figured i ate about a thousand of those mid-run those were
like the stable the pb and j’s god bless them they were the staple food lots of other things that were
highlight foods for me as well but pb js were like a lot of fun so it says here roughly about a 5 000
calorie a day diet yep yeah yeah how many calories a day were you burning
well it’s interesting how the body acclimates we had two physicians that were really kind to us along the way both just a general physician and then
uh orthopedic surgeon physician and you know my body we figured i probably you
know i was probably i should have been burning five to six thousand calories a day but my your body just regulates
after a little bit of time it was hard to actually take in i would try to five to six thousand calories many times i couldn’t quite get that in you know i
ended up losing about 17 or 18 pounds from beginning to end of the run um so i
definitely wasn’t keeping up as much as you know we would have liked but it was enough to kind of keep me moving
would you do it again yeah oddly you know i don’t i hope my
wife isn’t listening to this i’m kidding um it would be intriguing because you know when you do something once trace
you kind of you learn so much the first time around whatever it is all of us do things for the first time you go oh man all these learnings so
it would be intriguing to think about doing it again whether or not life in space would allow for it and would our
family dynamic you know be at the place where we want to do it again but it would be intriguing since you did it once
so you ended your run at battery park overlooking the statue of liberty what
was that moment like you’re finally coming to the end the statue of liberty is coming into focus you can’t run
anymore otherwise you’re going to get wet what was it like right yeah it was it was just a
tremendous sense of gratitude and gratefulness you know we i’m a person of faith and so you know there was a lot of prayers
that had been offered for me and for protection and then the the the run itself uh raised over a half million
dollars for clean water and so there’s a lot of thankfulness of the provisions both
both monetarily but provisions in so many different other ways as well so i think when i got to battery park there
was just this overwhelming sense of gratefulness uh and an overwhelming sense of like
almost like humility of like wow this this did occur and and this was like not about me it was about
what so many others had done to make it happen so you know it was it was fairly it felt good
and so interesting each day that i ran my body was acclimated to run anywhere between 25 and 40 miles average marathon
a day but there were some days i would do like a non-running day so the closing day of the run ended up being like an 18
mile run and so when i got to the end my body was like well you still got some more to do like you’re not done yet it’s
kind of weird like it was this great sense of like i’m done but it’s like it wasn’t like one of these thoughts where like i came and lunged myself for the
finish line it was like oh this it had become semi normal to do this but i was really glad to stop
i bet was there ever a moment in the cross-country trek where you said i
can’t do this yeah there there definitely were quite a few moments where there was a lot of
doubt for sure lots of different challenges multiple multiple challenges there was one particular day i caught
the flu in oklahoma lost a few days off the run schedule and i kind of this personal desire to to run to chicago we had fundraising
activities in chicago what i didn’t want to do is like you know be in southern illinois and then have to
drive to chicago because i lost some days off the run schedule and then speak and then come back you know down to
southern illinois you have to run that distance again so it became very important for me to make up days so i
ended up and it was the third week in july 2013 and i did way better than seven
marathons in seven days i i think it was like nine or ten i really scaled up my running every day but five of the seven
days that week the heat index was 115 plus and on one particular day i finished the
end of it it was like the third or fourth day of that week and i finished in some parking lot of a you know construction
company along interstate 55 i was completely trashed and done trace
and i sat down in a chair that our crew had put out for me and i was just i was
done and my wife sat down next to me she sat on the ground i was sitting in the chair and i just kind of with like tons
of tears rolling down my face out of just pure exhaustion i said i i do
believe i’m done i could not even envision waking up another day and doing another day i just couldn’t and my wife
very graciously sat there for what felt to be like five or ten minutes just in quiet
and then she spoke and she said she said babe i do believe god is going to resupply your energy tomorrow i think
you just have to trust in that and i didn’t even have the strength to believe
her disbelief her argue with her agree i just didn’t and the next day the
strength was there and so that was definitely the the one poignant day i wanted to call it quits
so there’s a memorable day well thanks for sharing all that with us let’s get into what world vision is what
exactly do they do yeah that’s a great question thank you um so world vision we happen to be the
largest christian humanitarian organization on the planet so we began um officially began in 1950
so we’ve been you know at this for about 70 years we’re in a hundred countries and you know our goal in the name of
christ is to serve the most vulnerable the most vulnerable children we have you know part of our ethos is to bring and
see fullness of life for every child and the will to make it so and so we have a at the core of who we
are we want to uh see communities lifted out of poverty for good
and so that’s sort of the short take of who we are and like i said we we’re in a hundred countries um we have about
almost 40 000 staff worldwide we have about 800 here in the united states that are domestic mainly
fundraisers you know people that are raising the awareness of what we do and raising the awareness of global poverty
the majority of our our staff if you will are all indigenous to the countries that we serve so if we have you know a
couple thousand staff that serve in the country of kenya for example they are indigenous kenyans to kenya
and so the work that we do on the ground is done indigenously at its core that
really aids to the sustainability of what we do to lift communities out of poverty for good
so many of us are so fortunate we turn on the faucet and there comes out clean
clear drinkable water we don’t ever think about it you are talking to the
industrial water treatment community what do you want them to know about the
world water crisis well for one thank you scaling up community for just being a part of just
what you do with water because in kenya for example in many african countries there’s a phrase which i know probably
all of you are quite familiar with water’s life and you know we again you just said it traced sometimes
we take it very for granted domestically here i think the average individual uses about 70 to 80 gallons
of water here domestically to you know whether you wash dishes over the course of the day take a shower you know wash a
load of laundry what have you flush the toilet and you know that’s we just we do take it for granted and whenever your
water’s been shut off i don’t know the last time your water gets shut off or you’ve been without water all of a sudden you realize oh okay this is a
pretty big deal you know obviously in the developing world we know the lack of clean drinking water it’s
the number one preventable cause of death on the planet again we can lower deaths on the on the
planet through just a provision of clean drinking water and so that which we work in every day those of
you listening that very subject matter in the developing world as you know when it’s provisions are made for it and
all of a sudden you know children mainly women and women and children who are the main water carriers in the developing
world when they’re not pulling water out of you know contaminated water sources
and by doing so they’re not even in school because they’re spending the bulk of their days gathering water
it it just all of a sudden healthiness in the community education becomes an opportunity you know healthcare just
skyrockets because the base layer of water which is needed for every other
building block to move a community out of poverty for good is taken care of so it is that most literally
the most important thing in community development what are some of the firsthand experiences that you’ve had working with
team world vision what are some things that you’ve seen and can you paint a picture of what it’s really like out
there yeah on one you know one particular trip i knew on this trip i was gonna
meet with world vision one of the one of the key things that we do within world vision that activates people is you know
not only raising money for clean water but then putting a face with it as well so child sponsorship is a big part of
who we are and has been ever since our inception in 1950 you know so this opportunity for someone like me a
person in the west to have a you know a friendship a relationship with with a
child so i can have a face to put in a name to pit with with the need so
i was going to be meeting one of our world vision sponsors to learn her name happens to be winnie i was going to be meeting her and her family for the first
time prior to meeting winnie and i can tell you a little bit more about wendy if you’d like us just a few fascinating
things about that prior to meeting winnie we’re just strolling through a little bit on some of the very undeveloped roads in this
part of kenya near the rift valley area and i noticed a girl off in the distance dropping a very small little you know
what probably was a one gallon container down into a what looked to be a pretty hand dug short was called a shallow well
and we just stopped the the land cruiser that we’re in and i asked is okay if i walk over and one of our kenyan guides
walked over with me so the little girl wasn’t freaked out because you know i was a white guy in the middle of nowhere and i just watched and her name was
cherub found out her name was cherub and she drew water out of this and i looked down in this it was a shallow well
because that can often be what happens folks will just dig as soon as they hit water and that becomes their water
source and i looked in the shell of well trace and i was like oh my i just could not
believe just seeing it i could tell it was contaminated and there there was a dead frog just on
the just floating on the top of the sh i could see it on the surface of the water and i’m thinking just something broke
inside of me and that was one small introduction and then a little bit later that day we
we did meet winnie and met her family we met near their very very humble home uh
hut and then we walked one mile to the water source that winnie and her family draw
out of and it was that trip to that water source that opened my eyes like you
wouldn’t believe well tell us about that what did you see well i mean it really was like a small
pond it might remind you like when when in the summertime as we’re driving around here on the interstate and you
kind of see these little small ponds off the side of the road where there’s might be livestock drinking out of you know and you see them all the time very small
and we got there instead of i kind of stood the edge of it and justina is winnie’s mother’s name and justina went
with us and with winnie and uh as we stood there i asked justine i said i was
just thinking through my head i’m going and again i’m fairly new in my understanding of some of this stuff and
i and i so i just asked her i said justina where do you all wash your clothes because i’m thinking where are clothes washed in this whole setting and
she said oh we washed them right here i’m kind of going wow okay so clothes are being washed in the same water
source and then i asked them where they bathe and of course that’s again it’s just it is their available water
source and then i i looked around the perimeter of this little pond trace and there were a few livestock that were
drinking and they were relieving themselves and i was thinking oh my goodness and
then so winnie and i then went out on this little little uh almost like a little inlet
and we put she had a small little jug when he was eight at the time and she had a little jug and i had a five gallon
jug and i put mine in just to share the experience of what happens with this and
it filled and i knew the statistics i knew it that half of the kids under the
age of five in winnie’s village would die because of that water i mean you know
diarrhea is the most common outgrowth of contaminated water and obviously when diarrhea sits in then you know the whole
thing goes south so maybe man half the kids under the age of five are gonna die and so the water flows into my jug and
then i did what they do every day three times a day i carried it back to their home one mile back
and you know i’m just not in the pattern of carrying five gallon water jugs they weigh 50 pounds
and that one mile walk back to winnie’s little home just wrecked me for one it was hard i
mean i’m like i’m like i was in fairly decent shape but and she and her mother just justina does this three times a day
when he was doing this you know three times a day and i’m thinking i almost was in despair
thinking about winnie and the thousands of kids like her and then i was reminded about what we do what we kind of
motivate people to do within our part of world vision is to invite people to put one foot in front of the other you know
through a race or through a walk and by that bring clean drinking water to children
like winnie and so the thought formed in my head oh my goodness if i can just devote myself to inviting others to put
one foot in front of the other they can create a whole new future for children like winnie and like literally literally
tens of thousands of kids like her so while i was filled with despair i was also filled with hope
well you’re referring to the 6k that world vision does every single year why is it a 6k i’ve heard of a 5k why a
6k yeah that’s a really good question so 6k actually is the average distance
that women and children like winnie and justina walk in the developing world so it’s like 3.87 miles for those of you
that are already putting this into google to see how far 6k is so it’s the average distance and so we we kind of
identified that within world vision when we started this 6k which hasn’t been that many years ago
2015 i think was our first year that we did the 6k we identified that because we wanted to raise awareness by the
distance itself to that and what’s really interesting is when when when somebody thinks through
well what if i were to do that distance not just once a day what we have obviously there’s plenty of women and
children who are doing this three times a day in the developing world it’s the average distance what means that you got
many who are doing it again multiple times a day and you’re you just kind of start rocking your world because the time that
it takes and and then of course what gets deleted from a child’s life if they are doing this again school
is a big deal there’s a lot that happens on the water walk um you know uh
child trafficking you know there’s a lot of there’s just a lot of bad stuff that can be happening in that type of
distance that’s you know covered each day so anyways the 6k is just that it’s a it’s almost a distance of solidarity
if you will last year i participated in my first 6k amazing awesome thank you
we had the orange uniforms my lovely bride and i went to our our park that’s right down the street from where we live
we had pictures of the two children that we were sponsoring and we are not runners racers by any
stretch of the imagination but we had the absolute worst times imaginable
doing the 6k because so many people were asking us what are you running for what’s on your
shirt tell us about what’s going on and i bet you 20 people we had conversations
with it was fantastic yeah it’s really cool you know that’s the we call it the bib that matters most
um and you nailed it some people think oh my 6k i’ve got i’ve got to be like a runner i’ve got an
absolutely not just because you all are listening to me and because i happen to have run across the united states that
isn’t like what the 6k the 6k is all about every anybody can do the 6k whether you people
do run it tons of people walk it um i did it i think in 2017 i did the 6k
with a 78 year old woman she did it with her walker i did i did it with her and this one not that you need to do
this but we have people that will do fundraising you know uh you you the the entrance is fifty dollars you get a
jersey like tracy is mentioning you get that bib and your fifty dollars provides clean drinking water for that
child so that’s one of the cool things with world vision we’re the largest non-governmental provider of clean drinking water on the planet so other
than governments we are providing more clean drinking water in developing countries and what we’ve isolated it to
on average so it’s 50 is what it takes to bring clean drinking water to one person so the entrance to do the 6k is
50 but that fifty dollars brings that clean water to one child that you have and it’s that bib that you have as that
pictorial reminder like you said trace which is so super cool because it makes it super personal
and if an individual wants to fundraise beyond that they can uh they’re certainly welcome to this
particular 78 year old woman she was just like seized by the vision is all i can say
she ended up raising 7 800 i was so inspired
walking alongside her with her walker like going all right
there’s not too many people that can now throw me an excuse oh i couldn’t do the six game one oh you probably can
well let me ask you about the fifty dollars how does fifty dollars bring clean water to one child
yeah so with our work one of the things that we love is that we will talk about the the
work that we do in the countries that we we work in we want to be both comprehensive and
obviously sustainable and obviously i’m talking to the scale of nation i’m talking to the the experts
here you know but in the developing world you know within a country there’s different methods you know for bringing
clean water you know obviously we think of borehole wells some of the most common method is is the borehole well
and again depending on the topography you know of the region depending on where that water table is yeah borehole
well could work and other places that may not work so then we have to flip to perhaps you know a water reservoir or i
know and you know you all know and it’s called a water pan which is basically kind of a dam or a reservoir
there’s obviously natural spring fed wells that can be done certainly solar powered paneled wells i mean
some of the most impressive projects again that i’ve seen are just full on pipeline systems that are done in all
like hand-carried pipes upsides of mountains if you will that bring you know i mean brings fresh
clean water to like thousands of individuals so there’s this gradation of full-on pipeline systems to poor hole
wells to water paints so the with will with world vision that aggregate you know depending on where the water
systems or what they are the aggregate average is 50
to do that depending on what the system is in the particular country so again it’s just fascinating and then i mean the super
fascinating part is not just in the hardware of the wells or the pipelines or the dams themselves but it’s in a
software of what happens within the community you know where community members over the course of time
learn how to care for their wells or care for their systems and water committees are
established so that they become sustainable because that’s a huge part of who we are this is not just about and
again the work is all done indigenously so it’s all done by indigenous kenyans or ethiopians not you know westerners
coming in and doing the work but how do you keep that sustainable for 10 and 20 and 30 years so that software
part of the training that we do within the communities is also just completely fascinating as well
well you have to tell us about that well i mean what happens so one thing is with world vision when how we we go about our
work is let’s just take the country for kenya for example we divide kenya or divide a country into smaller chunks we
call them area programs aps and think of it maybe the size of two to three u.s counties in size
and so we’ll take in a particular ap we’ll then uh for example in kenya we’ve
got 40 to 45 full-time kenyan graduate level water engineers come wash water
sanitation and hygiene our wash engineers will then look and say okay what kinds of systems do we need in the
country of kenya and you know as so then as they do that we’re in that community
that that ap we make a commitment to be in the ap for 15 to 20 years so this is a long-term
relationship with that community the first couple years is all trust building with the tribal leaders the
church leaders the community leaders find out their biggest needs and then they’re involved in the process
so that from the very beginning so after the opening couple years of trust building then it’s
implementation of some of the core things usually it’s water at first later becomes education healthcare and then
microfinance type of matters and certainly in those first formative years
from from like five to ten that’s when if they’re usually if there’s not clean water one of the first
sort of community based teams that’s formed is a water committee and once water systems are brought into the
community then how then does the community then pay for that because there’s got to be a source of revenue for that water to
continue so there’s i mean i mean we’re talking very very small amounts but people pay
for their water but it’s all governed by a local water committee if you will
and so then the training of caring for the wells or caring for the pipeline system is all done that
training and teaching is done through this system of our water engineers and the communities leaders that have been
now grown for this and it’s just fascinating when you’re in a community and you stand back and you
see the level of ownership taken by the community themselves for their wells or their dams or their
pipeline systems and like this is very personal to them and it’s no wonder that
we have just such a solid track record of sustainability after 10 20 and even
you know 30 35 years of water systems all across the world and it all starts with somebody putting
one foot in front of the other yes you nailed it you nailed the trace you
nailed it i thought you look at a problem like this you think what could i ever do it’s just a drip in the ocean if
you will but there is something we can do it’s very easy it can be fun it can educate
other people so we have a scaling up h2o web page we
have a team i’ll give the information on how people can sign up for that if they don’t have their own team already but
tell us about the process how do you get signed up what do you get when you get signed up what do you have to do what’s
that whole process like it’s super easy especially with what you’re doing trace you’ve got you’ve got all the
information already but it’s super easy you’ll go through you know the website that you all have it all goes to our
global 6k website with world vision you just sign up you do you’ll pay 50 i mean
i tell you what it’ll be the best 50 that you’ve ever spent i think because you’re going to be effectively changing
the life of one child and then you get a collection of that happening in a community then it just changes everything so but anyways you pay your
50 you register you’re gonna get a 6k a really cool 6k t-shirt you’re going to
get a medal uh you’re going to get the bib that matters most a bib of that child of course and then you’re going to
do it in community and what’s really fun is that this can be done people invite friends to do it with them
they invite family members to do it with them obviously obviously there’s no age restriction people are pushing strollers
with their kids again older people are doing this we have host sites um all around the
country in all around the world so you can you know you’ll you’ll find out you know if you’re gonna be doing it with a
scaling up host site or maybe there’s another post site that’s close to where you live you don’t have to do it with a whole
site you can do it like in your neighborhood you know you can chart your own 6k course we’ll have some host sites that might have 400 people at them and
then we have people that are going i’m going to get my family we’re going to we’re going to do it in our community like literally in our subdivision or i’m
going to do it my neighborhood park we make it so that the scalability is as much as you want to do it the the
important thing is you just said it’s just like saying yes it’s saturday may 21st that’s when the
the 6k date is this year saturday may 21st and just going on that saturday i’m
gonna make a difference and impact the world that’s what i’m gonna do i’m really excited for that date to come
i’m urging all the listeners in the scaling up nation to at least check it out we did it last year we we did team
building with it we had a lot of great dialogue around such an important cause something that’s that
we deal with on a regular basis which is water and now we’re doing something to help other people with the water crisis
so thanks for sharing all of that with us i’m so excited i hope the people listening are excited as well
oh yeah and i think like doing it i know with the listening audience you’re part of a you know a business or or a team
that has obviously multiple people associated with it this is a great way to build culture within your team we all
know this to be true as we lead teams we look for opportunities to build culture
within our team sometimes obviously outside of what we do on a day-to-day basis while water is your work doing
this kind of thing will build amazing culture with your team and then as they invite people to do it with them this
will be one of those very memorable things that i think an individual and individuals can do together that it’s
just kind of like going we did that it was just and yeah i just always encourage people to like jump in it
themselves invite some other people to do it you know with them and maybe set some kind of an audacious goal like hey
we want to get x number to do this with us or we want to see this much raised
and you know and i think when we do those kinds of things it puts us in a position of like on you know this is
good this is good this is good and steve i really want to thank you for coming on the podcast and
sharing all this and i am really excited for may 21st
yeah yeah as am i as am i it’d be fun to do it i can’t wait knowing that there’s this whole community doing it’s gonna it
just gives me even more i mean obviously i’ll be out there gives me tons of motivation so we’re a community doing it
together so thank you did you know that you could do so much
by simply putting one foot in front of the other i’m just amazed by that
expression because who knew doing that leads to so much
who knew that so much could be done for just fifty dollars and who knew
that wearing one of those bibs can start so
many conversations stacy my lovely bride and i did this 6k
last year and we had a fantastic time we met so
many new people along the trail that we took and we got to tell our story
about why we were walking we were walking because we were talking
we didn’t do a lot of running a little bit of running was involved but this was all about telling the story having fun
getting the message out there now we also did this with the rising
tide mastermind several of us made sure that we registered and we
weren’t physically together but we were definitely together in spirit we were
all posting pictures of each other and we were sharing the stories that we were
sharing the experiences that we were having and we just had a great time with
it in fact some of the members of the rising tide mastermind actually carried five gallon pails to represent the
journey that steve described so imagine carrying that 50 pound almost 50 pound
jug along that 6k journey nation we can do something about
this and we can do this we can do this 6k and we can bring awareness to this
issue we can do something about this issue and we can participate as a
community while we’re doing all of those things i urge you to go to scaling up
h2o.com forward slash and join team scaling up nation
the 6k is going to be on may 21st and we are hoping to get the entire scaling up
nation involved or maybe you want to join as your company or your
team that’s fine just go out there and do it just put one
foot in front of the other and share this story again that’s going to be on
may 21st and we’re going to be sharing pictures via scaling up h2o and hashtag worldvision
if you are getting our social media posts you know that we are letting you know everything we can about team world
vision this year and how you can get involved with the 6k with the scaling up nation
again just so amazed what you can do in just six kilometers for just fifty
dollars and just sharing the story i’m also amazed at how sharing this story
creates a ripple effect you will tell somebody somebody else
will tell somebody they know and so on and that’s how movements start so
whether you are pushing a stroller pushing a walker or setting your
lifetime record as a runner get out there register and help us all put an end to
this crisis nation i can’t wait to hear what you are
doing to spread this message and i can’t wait to run with you on may 21st and
until then i hope you have a great week until i bring you a brand new episode
next week take care everybody scouting up nation so many people that i
talk to want to join the rising tide mastermind but they’re concerned about
being able to commit one hour a week for the mastermind calls folks i have to
tell you when you experience that hour you realize that that is the power hour
that changes every other hour that you will experience that week if we keep
doing the same things we will keep doing the same results and that one hour a week allows you to get out of the
day-to-day so you can work on your day-to-day do something different find out about
the rising tide mastermind by going to scalinguph2o.com forward slash
mastermind