PURPOSE, INC.

Participants:

Michael Young

Kim Worsham, Founder and Principal of FLUSH

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Michael Young:

Welcome to the Purpose, Inc., the podcast where we discuss corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. I'm your host, Michael Young.

Okay. So, what is something that we all use every day but never really think about or talk about? You guessed it, toilets. And seriously, who's even passionate about toilets or wants to think about them? Well, my guest today Kim Worsham is very passionate about toilets. In fact, Kim is a social entrepreneur and the founder of FLUSH, and FLUSH is a women-owned firm focused on WASH, W-A-S-H, water, sanitation and hygiene. And FLUSH does sanitation, education, advocacy and consulting to help build greater awareness, public awareness for sanitation, develop advocacy initiatives and enhance the professionalism in institutions working in sanitation. Kim has worked all over the world for NGOs focused on safe drinking water in places like India and Kenya and Ghana and Cambodia. She's even taught math in Rwanda. And we got into a very fascinating conversation about the social-economic racial and gender equity issues surrounding access to toilets in communities from Africa and India to right here in the good old U.S. of A. And yes, let us not forget that right here in major cities and in rural communities, there is a lack of clean water and sanitation and people are being marginalized and made more vulnerable as the result. And so, Kim really spends her time and her vast energy as you will hear from this episode working to improve outcomes and figuring out how to help internal stakeholders at organizations and their supporters implement solutions in the space of water and sanitation. And appropriately, I spoke to Kim on World Toilet Day which is November 19th in case you're wondering. So, without further ado, my incredible and fun conversation with Kim Worsham of FLUSH. Kim, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Kim Worsham:

Thanks so much for inviting me.

Michael Young:

Yeah. So, a big day today. It is World Toilet Day.

Kim Worsham:

It is. November 19th.

Michael Young:

Right. And so, let's get into it. What's happening on World Toilet Day and why do we need to continue to talk and think about sanitation and toilets and clean water and all of that?

Kim Worsham:

Yeah, it's a big question now. Yeah. So, the goal of World Toilet Day is really to educate people and have them celebrate toilets in general. I mean sanitation is such a critical part to a healthy, thriving society and the UN a while back decided that world toilet day should be a holiday as it is and every year on the 19th of November is when we all gather around and tell our toilet stories. Really what ends up happening normally is the water and sanitation sector that I'm in, we tend to just put out a whole lot of 50 page reports which is unfortunate. I'm not of that school. So, today I've been, well, I have a kids class that I'm teaching after this so that'll be fun where I'm like helping kids learn how to like design toilets and draw toilets and talk about why they made toilets the way they did. And what I also did this morning actually, so there's a company called the Toilet Board Coalition. So, they work with like Kimberly-Clark and Unilever and all those big toilet paper, toilet accoutrement category consumables. So, they put together an event this morning where I was on the panel and I was talking about basically equity. So, talking about how the leadership in the sanitation sector should have more gender equality but also more equity and inclusion beyond gender. So, that's what I did today.

Yeah. And sanitation is really important. People don't know this but I mean one in four people in the world don't have access to safe toilets. And also, I can't remember the exact number right now, but a couple million people in the world or billion people in the world don't have good access to clean drinking water and it's interesting. It's kind of the sad sister to a lot of other development sectors and it's a bummer because if you don't have good access to clean drinking water and safe access to toilets, it's really the center of how to make everyone healthy and happy in society. So, things start breaking down. Like if people are getting diarrheal diseases, they won't go to school. Kids won't be able to go to school or people can't go to work and make money. Or if you're a woman and you have menstruation and there's nothing to accommodate you at your school or your place of work, you can't go and you're losing out on all of the benefits of having education and the ability to make money. So, really I think of it as kind of the center of the universe when I think about making the world a better place.

Michael Young:

That's such an awesome way to think about the toilet as something that is just really central to our daily lives, we take for granted incredibly and of all the things where inequity is built in right there. So, talk a little bit about the parts of, you mention teaching. Talk a little more about the consulting work that you do with FLUSH, talk about education, talk about kind of where you fit into the whole social impact ecosystem if you would. Just kind of give us a broader survey of your work and maybe a little bit of your background because you've kind of been there, done that all over the world. So, I'd like to hear some frontline stories as well.

Kim Worsham:

Sure. Gosh, where do I start? So, I'll start with the stuff that I work on right now. So, what I do with FLUSH. So, I have some contracts as an independent contractor as well with groups like the World Bank and USAID which is the U.S. government arm of providing international aid. So, I do work with them. But with FLUSH, it's a new company but what we're doing is really thinking about the internal management structures and systems for running water and sanitation operations. So, a lot of the world of water and sanitation is really heavily engineers. It's a lot of engineers. It's a lot of people in the world of nonprofits, maybe some public health experts. Not a lot of people with a business background or know how to run systems in a good way, maybe not necessarily always the most people-people if you will. So, one of the things that FLUSH is really trying to look at is saying, you can put in all these flashy technologies and think about the nuts and bolts of the machinery to make clean water and safe toilets work out. We're not so focused on that because it's a people's issue. So, if you really don't have systems in place to manage people well as in your consumers, your customers, your beneficiaries but also the people who are doing the work on a day-to-day basis, really this is not going to work well and when we're talking about financial viability of these kinds of projects, they're not going to do that well which is something that is definitely a pain point right now in the water and sanitation sector in general.

So, what we're trying to focus on is well, how can we fix some of the internal structures? First of all, can we talk about your data systems? How are you assessing performance on a regular basis? Do you actually assess performance on a regular basis? Oftentimes, the answer is no. So, figuring out, well, what does that look like? How can you build that system in to really help drive change in a way that's going beyond just kind of plunking in a toilet and checking the box and saying we did it? So, that's part of what we're trying to do. What we're also trying to do is help the sector change the story. So, while we're going in and trying to fix their systems, trying to help sanitation change the story because right now a lot of it is talking about the whomp-whomps. Like oh, so, many people don't have access. That's so sad. Yes, we really need your help. And really that story really wears people out. If you're talking to the general public, it's really hard to get people's interest and keep it with that kind of story. So, really helping organizations think about well, how do you communicate this well? Who are you trying to communicate it to? Also, there's only so many times I can read a technical paper which is something my sector is really big on is writing these like 50-page technical papers with statistics and words like enteric intestinal disease which is really fun, of course, but there's only so many times you can read that and actually feel like you're getting something out of it. So, we're trying to fix that storyline with ultimate goal of really helping the organizations in the sector unlock finance by really having better built systems internally.

And we also do this education for the public where we're trying to get people to destigmatize conversations around sanitation by making it fun to learn about and making it not scary, not taboo and gross. Like we don't talk about poo very much. We talk really about the toilets and the culture of toilets and how it works in different parts of the world and stuff like that. And I feel like there's something that I didn't get to answer that you wanted to know. Oh, you wanted to know my background a little bit. Well, the short and sweet of it is my background is very much a winding loop. It's not a straight line. I worked for the Bloomberg Administration in New York City for a little bit. I worked as a math teacher in Rwanda for a little bit. I did some consulting work in healthcare. But sanitation has always been my passion. It's just hard sometimes I think to get to your passion to pay you money.

And one of the big things that really kind of sealed the deal for me in wanting to get into sanitation, when I was teaching math in Rwanda for a little bit in 2012, we had a typhoid outbreak at the school. So, these are young women, 18 and older and there was a typhoid outbreak. And we found out partly it was because the women didn't understand how to use the flushing toilets at the school. They understood how to use squat toilets but we had these flushing toilets with water in it. So, some of them are using the waste baskets instead which means if someone brings typhoid in from say a community elsewhere, pees in a bin and a mosquito gets to it, that can spread like wildfire. And so, to me, it really sealed the deal and we had to close the school down for a bit just to kind of make sure that we could manage the typhoid. A lot of the women were sick and we couldn't teach women how to kind of improve their professional skills at all. So, that's really kind of the thing that emboldened me and then moving forward really saying well, my background is business, my background is really about stories and data and really kind of using those to drive impact and looking at the sector that I'm in, water and sanitation now and seeing that that's kind of a broken system, that it's just not done very well. So, really wanting to provide myself as a catalyst to try to drive that change and really hoping that it changes the story and also, just makes it so that the social impact stories are more compelling but also getting to the right people.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. And bringing in lots of relevant partners to the discussion. When we were doing our prep call, we were talking a bit about taboos. We talked about taboos. And I have young children and believe me, we've had plenty of poop talk and potty talk and toilet talk in this house, right? It just comes with it. But then you think about as adults, then we're somewhat squeamish about this or at least we want to just kind of push it out of our minds. And I think the what you've talked about in terms of equity is really important and it's not just a developing world issue. That was the other thing that I have in my notes when we talked is like this is here today. In the U.S., there are places where water and sanitation are not up to the standards we would want. Correct?

Kim Worsham:

Oh, absolutely. Actually, someone just wrote published a book about the issues in the U.S., by a woman named Catherine Flowers and it's a book called Waste. And I think it came out today. But I mean the point is we absolutely have an issue in the U.S. It's really not a low income country, issued water and sanitation. It's a low-resourced area issue. So, when we look at who in the country doesn't have good access, it's often people of color, often they're in low-income areas. A lot of them are actually in urban areas in low-income parts of urban areas where they don't have access to plumbing, where they don't necessarily have reliable sanitation that works, maybe their septic tank breaks if they're in more of a rural area. They did a study a couple years ago and found one-third of Alabama County had hookworm and a lot of people think of hookworm as this thing that's only really in Africa, right? Like that's kind of the general stereotype. But no, it's a low-resourced area issue when you have a broken sanitation system and people's raw sewage is going out into their fields or is getting into their waterways and they're interacting with it. And then we think in the U.S., it's also about the houselessness issues we have where people who are houseless, if there are no public toilets in a region, you better believe that they're going to open defecate. They're going to go shit outside because they don't have anywhere else to go even though we all shit every day. We all have to do this. they're going to have to find a way to do it and it's usually going to be in an undignified way outside because they don't have any other options. And that's a really big public health issue like we're in right now. We're in COVID pandemic lockdown still and I'm always like yeah, but like the next pandemic could be a Hepatitis A outbreak. This has already happened in California a couple years ago as well where they had a Hepatitis A outbreak because houseless people didn't have access to toilets. Someone had Hepatitis A. They open defecated somewhere and it spread like wildfire. It's a public health issue. We have these diseases in our bodies that we're processing and if you don't have a good way to safely maintain it, it's going to get out and it's going to interact with people. So, it's a big issue and I really wish people would realize it's something in their backyard that they have to think about.

Michael Young:

Yeah. Well, famously San Francisco has a poop map for that very reason due to houselessness.

Kim Worsham:

They're not the only city now with that.

Michael Young:

They're not. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. And well, I do think we've gone a long way toward criminalizing poverty and that is unfortunate rather than dealing with root causes and coming up with solutions. So, talk about what are the easy things that cities or communities can do? What are the harder things that are out of reach? And how should change agents be thinking about that and reacting to this issue?

Kim Worsham:

That's a good question. I think one of the biggest things that would help especially in urban places is really getting advocacy wrangled or, I'm trying to think of a better word, or having people advocate in groups to their local council people to really put in budgets and figure out public access to toilets. It's like the first step. It's a really good step too. A lot of cities don't want to put money into public toilets because they think of it as a kind of a money pit because it just costs a lot of money to maintain the toilets, to make sure they're clean and safe and to empty them and put them in the right place. There's a public toilet in New York City in Bryant Park that's managed by the Bryant Park Foundation and I mean it cost them I think upwards of $400,000 every year just to manage the toilets. So, it costs money. There are ways that we can fix that. So, we could make public toilets have like a sliding scale of pay. There's some really cool models in India where they have cafés attached to public toilets so that it kind of offsets the costs of running the public toilets. I think that's really cool. So, there's ways to be innovative about how we finance public toilets that could really help solve some of our key big issues that go beyond the home.

And then when it comes to like household sanitation issues, I hate to get political but the Green New Deal, it sounds pretty promising if they include access to refurbishing or not access, but if they include finance and resources to refurbishing some of our old decaying sewer systems, putting in new sewer systems in places where they should have them and they didn't put them in 100 years ago because no one lived there at the time. That's a big deal and again, a lot of its money and a lot of it is political will. Who really wants to have a wastewater plant named after them aside from Jamie Oliver? I'm sorry, John Oliver. But it's like the only people that wants that. But it's so quintessential and the systems we're using now are really 150 years old because when we put them in the 1880s in a lot of the big urban cities in the U.S., those are the things we're using still. And we really need to put in that advocacy to really push politicians and push government agencies to understand that this is really something that people are willing to put money into. But also then getting people to realize that they should put money or they want to put their money into it is like another thing that we have to do is really educate investors, educate citizens about how important it is for them to really rally for this cause.

Michael Young:

Yeah, I'm going to steal the march of a guest I'll have on after you, Pamela Rucker who said something to me about race is it isn't that we don't know what's right, the question is why don't we care. And I think there's a lot of, as you were talking about will, right? The political will, it's not that we don't have the money, it's not that we don't have the resources. It's simply that we don't have the political will and it's not a priority. So, how do we change that? You're doing it clearly. But what else do we need to do? Who else do we need to talk to and educate about this topic to get movement? How do you think about that?

Kim Worsham:

Well, the way I think about it is we have to make it fun and entertaining. You can really get people to change their behavior and change their mindset with fun. I mean we've seen this across history in a lot of ways. I mean Live Aid was an entertainment venue specifically to increase awareness about AIDS. I mean and look at where we are now where we're talking about a disease where we might actually get a vaccine for it in the not-so-far-away future. There are ways to really kind of drive that interest and get people to realize. There’s celebrity backing and I think right now Matt Damon's the only person that talks about water and sanitation in the celebrity world. And that's great but maybe he should have some friends that talk about it with him. One of the things I worry, the downer of how humans function is it seems like we really need catastrophe to put a light under our ass sometimes and get us to do stuff about it. And I'm really hoping that we don't get to a position where the only way we'll be able to respond is because we have a public health outbreak, like another one that's actually diarrheal diseases like typhoid or hepatitis that are really damaging, that are really problematic. So, I think about entertainment quite a lot. I think about really bringing in more celebrity interest. I think that really helps get people curious. They've done it really well in India. So, the India's government has worked with Bollywood over there and they've put, I think there's two or three movies now about sanitation, menstrual hygiene and toilets and different things that have done really well. And they're fun. I've actually seen both of them and they're delightful and there's music and you can sing to it.

Michael Young:

Dance routines?

Kim Worsham:

Dance routines.

Michael Young:

Okay, I’m in.

Kim Worsham:

It's wonderful, yeah.

Michael Young:

I’m in. Just say Bollywood dance routine. I mean I love it. I love it.

Kim Worsham:

Totally.

Michael Young:

Yeah. That's a really interesting perspective about making it fun and destigmatizing and removing taboos. And I just always think about Americans’ puritanical roots and how we won't talk about defecation, menstruation. Any bodily function is just as off-limits. So, I'm glad we're talking about it here.

Kim Worsham:

Yeah.

Michael Young:

I really am, I really am.

Kim Worsham:

We poo every day and women bleed every month. So, it’s not that rare.

Michael Young:

How about it. Welcome to the world.

Kim Worsham:

Exactly.

Michael Young:

It's a regular thing. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you for joining me on the podcast today and talking about this issue. And I have to say it was not on my radar like most people. I think about it but the way you talk about it I think is really refreshing and eye-opening and I'm excited to help you share your story and communicate it because it is a topic and it's not just a faraway place in India or Africa that we need to pay attention to this. It's right here at home and I really appreciate how you think about and talk about and embed equity and inclusion into this discussion because that's really, really powerful and the topic I like talking about on this podcast.

Kim Worsham:

Well, I'm so glad that it's gotten you to think about toilets a little more.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and on World Toilet Day no less.

Kim Worsham:

Exactly.

Michael Young:

It's exciting. I'm just sorry this will come out a couple weeks from now or a week and a half from now. And people will be like it was World Toilet Day, I didn't do anything, I didn't thank my toilet. But we can. We can do that every day, right?

Kim Worsham:

Exactly. Just thank it. And I'm actually going to be doing a fun thing with some colleagues in other organizations for after Christmas. We're going to do like a Relieve Yourself of 2020 with your toilet adventure.

Michael Young:

Okay. Yes. We could flush 2020. Could we just like, I think everybody's thinking that. I think you're onto something. I really do. I really do.

Kim Worsham:

Yeah.

Michael Young:

All right. Well, Kim thank you so much for coming on and I really appreciate the discussion.

Kim Worsham:

Me too. And yeah, happy World Toilet Day again.

Michael Young:

Thank you.

Conclusion:

The Purpose, Inc. Podcast is a production of Actual Agency, helping innovators communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.

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