The Odyssey To Bring Clean Water To Everyone: How Matt Damon And Get Blue Are Inviting Brands To Help
Water.org is a global nonprofit co-founded by Gary White and Matt Damon that brings safe water and sanitation to families through small, affordable loans. | Water.org
Ninety million people. That is how many lives Water.org — the global nonprofit co-founded by Gary White and Matt Damon to bring safe water and sanitation to the world — has already reached with safe water access. Not through wells, not through aid, but through an idea that White had to spend years convincing banks to believe in. The idea was simple: if a family living without running water is already paying for it — to a vendor, or in hours of daily walking — then they have the capacity to repay a small loan that brings a pipe or a pump directly into their home. The loan gets repaid at a 98% rate, that money flows back into the system, and the next family gets their turn.
I asked Damon what his recent experience playing Odysseus gave him for this monumental challenge of bringing clean water into everybody’s lives. "That it's a long journey. You know, his was 20 years, and I'm 20 years in now myself, and it's ongoing. So I guess he's a good primer for the beginning of the mission, but the mission is ongoing. Gary's been at it quite a bit longer than I have, so Gary's nearing 40 years doing this."
White had been refining that model for nearly two decades when Damon came across his work and reached out. The two co-founded Water.org, and together quietly rewrote how the world thinks about water access. White once did the math on what would have happened had they stuck with traditional well-drilling. It would have taken 600 years to reach the 90 million people they have helped so far.
Six hundred years. That number says less about the size of the problem than about the inadequacy of the old answers. Now, with a goal of reaching more than 200 million people by 2030, White and Damon are reaching for something bigger still — a way to bring the mainstream in.
A Model Built to Scale
Launched on June 9, 2026, Get Blue is a global movement co-created with founding partners Gap Inc., Starbucks, Amazon, and Ecolab, with TikTok, AccuWeather, and Ripple joining shortly after. The initiative is designed to turn daily habits — buying a hoodie, ordering a drink, streaming a playlist — into meaningful impact for families who still spend hours each day without access to safe water at home.
The inspiration is Product Red, the consumer fundraising platform co-founded by Bono in 2006 that proved everyday purchases — a t-shirt, a coffee, a phone — could mobilize serious capital for a global health crisis, channeling hundreds of millions of dollars toward the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. White and Damon saw the same architecture as a model for water, and reached out to Bono before launching. "We had a great conversation with him and he blessed it — go for it with Get Blue," White said. "It's great to have that experience base to draw on."
But Get Blue is not simply that model applied to water. The financial engine underneath it — Water.org’s microfinance approach — means that every dollar raised does more than it appears to. When a loan is repaid, it doesn't disappear. It funds the next loan. And the more people Water.org reaches, the further each dollar goes. "It's a beautiful story," White said, “repeated now almost 17 million times.”
Families use the loans to connect water directly to their homes, repay them at a 98% rate, and that money flows back to help the next family. To date, more than 90 million lives have been reached. | Benjamin Heath
Where Commerce Meets Consequence
The founding partners each bring their own mechanic. Gap’s limited-edition Get Blue Collection — denim, tees, and sweats reimagined in the movement's signature blue — donates $5 to Water.org per purchase, enough to help one person access safe water.
Starbucks is launching two exclusive Get Blue drinks on June 16: the Iced Blue Coconut Matcha and the Blue Coconut Refresher, with $0.25 from every purchase going to Water.org through July 7. Amazon is letting customers donate $5 with a single voice command to Alexa+ and generating donations every time someone streams a participating artist's playlist on Amazon Music. Ecolab, the global water management company, has committed $1 million through the Ecolab Foundation.
White is deliberate about how loosely the model is structured. "We're not prescriptive about how you participate," he said. "It's really about you designing your own manner of participation that works for you and works toward your strengths." That flexibility is a feature, not a concession. The goal is to cast as wide a net as possible — and to make participation feel effortless enough that people actually do it.
Recruiting Culture to Drive Action
Damon has not been shy about playing his part. The launch included a video in which he debuts a self-written rap as an alter ego, The Nomad — Damon spelled backwards — before enlisting GRAMMY Award-winning producer Hit-Boy and songwriter Teddy Walton to salvage the effort. It is self-aware, deliberately playful, and entirely intentional. "Music moves people in ways that few things can. It connects us, crosses borders, and makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves. That's what Get Blue is built on."
And if that means making a fool of himself, so be it. "I always go back to Paul Newman’s guiding phrase — shameless exploitation for the common good," Damon laughs. "I'm happy to do silly things and make a fool of myself if it raises awareness."
When I pressed Matt on his top rappers of all time, he said "I am a huge fan of the medium. I mean, I’m old school." — before sharing that Tupac and Biggie are his foundation, the giants he grew up on, plus Jay-Z and Kendrick.
The campaign extends to TikTok, where Get Blue is inviting anyone to film themselves changing one thing blue — a nail polish color, a reusable bottle, a Gap hoodie — and nominate friends to do the same under #GetBlue. It is the logic of a viral challenge applied to a global problem.
The Generation That Could Actually Solve This
What White and Damon are ultimately offering is not guilt. It is possibility. The framing matters, because the scale of the water crisis — two billion people, one in four on earth — tends to trigger paralysis rather than action.
"The problem really is solvable," White said. "People should be leaning into this because we really can solve this in our lifetime. Instead of looking at it as a massive problem, look at it as this opportunity — that we get to be the generation that solves this."
That reframe, from crisis to opportunity, mirrors the logic of the microfinance model itself: find the mechanism that makes people want to act, remove the friction, and trust them to do the rest. The loans get repaid. The water gets connected. The circle expands. "I won't stop looking for creative ways to draw attention, encourage participation and drive donations to help solve the global water crisis," Damon said.
Get Blue is betting that the same logic applies to culture. Buy the hoodie. Order the drink. Say the words to Alexa. $5 at a time, two billion people become one billion, then fewer. It sounds incremental until you look at what 90 million people with running water looks like compared to where Water.org started, or how long the old approach would have taken to get there.
The faucet turns on. Someone gets their time back. They go to work. And the cycle repeats. It’s time more brands got involved to accelerate and scale this urgent work.
To learn more or donate, visit GetBlue.water.org.
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