From fashion to designing for development: Q&A with Sophia Sunwoo

Devex
By Jenny Lei Ravelo

Sophia Sunwoo, CEO and co-founder of the Water Collective. Photo by: Kimberly Jauss / Water Collective

The Water Collective’s goal for 2017 is to provide water filters to 156 families living in Dabal, Uttar Pradesh, India. The main water source for families in Dabal is the Kali River, heavily contaminated with poisonous metals such as lead and chromium.

This is quite different from the nonprofit’s projects in Cameroon, where its work centered around building catchment systems in communities and rehabilitating water systems by adding new tap stands and fixing broken ones.

But that is the model Water Collective follows: no one-size-fits-all approach. The aid organization tailors its solutions to what they discover is needed in the community they’ve partnered with, which isn’t always about the lack of taps or water pumps.

“My co-founder, Josh [Braunstein], and I started Water Collective because we’re seeing that a lot of the water projects in the developing world wherever you went 30 percent to 50 percent of these water projects would be broken,” Sunwoo told Devex. “So it really started out from this question of why are these water projects broken and why are not many water organizations talking about this aspect of the water crisis?”

It took both Sunwoo and Braunstein a few years of researching and revising before arriving with their current model, which ultimately ends with a Water Independence declaration — that moment when communities no longer rely on outside help to maintain their water systems. How long communities take to get to that point of self-sufficiency depends on a number of factors, such as the complexity of their water systems and ability to organize.

Here’s an excerpt from Devex’s conversation with the CEO and co-founder of the Water Collective, edited for clarity and length.

Your background was in design. How did you end up working in the water sector?

I did my undergraduate studies in design strategy, but prior to Water Collective, a couple years back, I had started a clothing company with a friend that became really successful. We ended up selling the company, and that is sort of the backstory as to why I wanted to go to design school. But when I was in design school I realized that I wanted to explore design as applies to solving social issues. So I actually spent a year doing my senior thesis on studying that specific field: How can we use design to help solve the world’s biggest problems?

How did you decide you want to focus on water?

My senior thesis was specifically focused on natural disasters. I was studying what do places like Haiti and other developing communities that have absolutely no resources do when there is a natural disaster. They don’t have ambulances. They don’t have immediate medical care, and maybe not the best infrastructure to protect them during a natural disaster such as a tornado or hurricane.

So I studied specifically that, and then when it came to water, I think that I was at a point where I graduated from design school and I really wanted to go into the NGO world, but it didn’t turn out the way I wanted to. I ended up working at a consulting job, [and then] I met my co-founder Josh, who has been in the water space since he was 15. He had been working on water projects in Kenya, Uganda, Southeast Asia, and he had heard from a colleague of mine at my old job that I’d been an entrepreneur and [that] I wanted to go into the social impact space.

So he had that information in his head, and when he and I started talking it was just a very natural conversation of him saying “oh I want to start an organization,” and I was like, “I would love to help,” and it evolved from there.

I think it was just a very serendipitous meeting of two people that are just very motivated, and when they said they want to do something they actually do it.

Was there anything in particular from design school that heavily influenced on your operating model at Water Collective?

So for me that’s kind of the same approach I had with the solutions for these social issues. When it came to water specifically, obviously there is this water crisis and people not having water, but this underlying problem of people getting water, but a year or two later they would lose that clean water because of poor design. It just feels to me that there’s so much opportunity for someone like me to come in and figure out how do we redesign this so that it’s better and more efficient and it serves the person at the receiving end better.

Sophia Sunwoo with co-founder Josh Braunstein. Photo by: Kimberly Jauss

How did you apply that approach in practice?

When we research why these water projects were breaking, our first assumption is it’s probably an engineering problem. But while we’re researching, we realize that it actually had very little to do with engineering. It had to do with the fact that a lot of these communities live in rural areas and therefore they’ve usually never seen or had to deal with keeping up with the maintenance of a water project.

So our team in Cameroon and India first assess if a community is in need of a new water system, or if they have a broken water system, how do we go about fixing that? Once we figure that out, throughout the whole process our water independence program will train the community to create these systems I was talking about. They are making sure the caretakers are checking up on the system every month, making sure there’s a treasurer and a secretary providing that system, teaching those concepts, and then going to the stage of being hands-on about it, because we’re realizing that we could do as many training sessions as we want, but people don’t retain information unless they practice it and do it themselves.

So up to two years after a water system is installed, our teams on the ground will actually act like in-person customer support where whenever the community has issues. For example, a water system is dispensing a low volume of water, our team will be in the field and troubleshoot with them, saying “where should we look first? OK there’s no problem with that catchment plate. Why don’t we walk the pipeline and see if there are any cuts into the pipeline or blockages in the pipe?” So they walk them through that whole thinking process, so that at some point they’ll actually be able to think for themselves and be able to troubleshoot with their fellow committee members.

But it’s funny because all of my [initial] ideas never turned out the way it should. So, for example, in the first year we had a completely different model. We weren’t focused on maintenance. But when we were gathering research and back from the field, we realized that our first concept in the first year didn’t make any sense according to what people needed on the ground. So we kept on revising our model to accommodate.