At the age of 21 she wanted to help the 900 million people who don’t have access to safe water.

By JUSTINE FLYNN, co-founder of Thankyou Group

Here in Australia, we’re constantly reminded about how lucky we are to be living in a country with as many advantages as ours. We all have worries and things that keep us up at night, but for the most part, access to basic life necessities such as safe water, shelter and food aren’t on that list.

Sometimes, it takes one conversation for it all to really sink in — for my fellow Thankyou co-founders and I, this was learning that while 900 million people don’t have access to safe water, Australians alone spend $600 million on the bottled water industry each year! We were all in either our late teens or early twenties at the time — just a group of friends at university — and these facts really hit us. We were determined to do something about it. That’s when we came up with our big idea. We would begin selling bottled water with all proceeds funding safe water projects in the world’s poorest nations — places like Myanmar, Cambodia and Kenya — where a lack of clean drinking water has a devastating effect on the health of entire communities.

So we launched Thankyou Water with a goal to funnel the profits of the multi-million dollar bottled water industry into providing life-changing water solutions to those who need it most. We had no business experience and no money, but loads of passion and determination.

We volunteered our time to build the organisation for the first three years — we worked part time jobs and studied uni degrees on the side. It was a crazy time, and it’s safe to say we didn’t get much sleep for a few years, but it was exciting and we kept each other going, determined to make the business work.

After five years of fighting to make our dream a reality, last year, we had a watershed moment. We made a brave decision to launch two new ranges, Thankyou Food and Thankyou Body Care, and started a massive social media campaign calling on Aussies to post messages of support for Thankyou products on the Facebook pages of Coles and Woolworths. It paid off, and our products are now stocked by both supermarket giants, as well as 7-Eleven, Australia Post, IGA, right around the country. It was incredible to receive that kind of support from the Australian community, but the ultimate reward has been the difference this has already made. In just over six months since we launched our two new ranges, we’ve provided over 60,000 people with health and hygiene training and have helped over 67,000 people access safe water.

I’ll never forget my first trip to Cambodia, to inspect the work being done in one of the communities we were supporting. The village was full of incredible people, but one woman’s story in particular really resonated with me. She told me that the safe water project in her village had allowed her to save money previously spent treating her family for water-borne diseases. She’d used that money to buy a motorised plough which had helped dramatically in increasing her family’s income. I was blown away, and continue to be amazed, by the fact that something as simple as access to clean water can transform people’s lives and by the determination of the women in these communities to support their families in such difficult circumstances.

We’re passionate at Thankyou about working to improve gender equality and it’s been a major factor in our decision to support the OXFAM Bangladesh WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) Project. The project provides health and hygiene training for women across the country and aims to reduce the discrimination they face on a daily basis by improving access to health, nutrition, security and education and by positioning them as powerful leaders and decision makers within their communities. Over the next two years, this project will aim to help 17,550 people access safe water across 52 villages and 54,000 access health and hygiene education across 27 villages.

I’ve been so lucky to witness firsthand the potential for education to empower women to become agents of change and to see the enormous impact that simple things like hygiene training and safe water access can have on the lives of some of the estimated 1.4 billion people who live in extreme poverty around the world. I’m inspired every day by the men, women and children in these communities and I am so grateful to the Aussies whose continued support for our products allows us to do what we do and whose simple choice as consumers makes an unimaginable difference to those people who need it most.

To get involved in the Thankyou Group movement, please visit: http://thankyou.co