Turning Water into Team Purpose

It’s deeply personal, it’s someone else’s team.  I regularly facilitate teams in various organisation big and small and across a range of industries.  But never before has it been so personal.  Let me explain.

In my early career I was a humanitarian aid worker and lived in many countries working in war zones as well as developing communities.

One of those places was a little town called Ikutha in Kenya (if you ever watched RPA in the earlier years you may remember a boy named Safari who came to Australia for multiple surgeries) that is where Ikutha is, right near his home town.

When we first arrived in Ikutha, we went down to the river to gather water.  It was bone dry and I looked at it unable to believe that it was possible to get any water from there at all.  I was even more surprised to learn that we had to dig down to underneath the water table to allow the water to seep to the top then pipe it into big jerry cans, and all of this before we could have a bucket shower or our morning cup of tea!  It took literally hours for us to fill one gerry can and we quickly realised that outsourcing to the beautiful village women was the best way forward.

Fast forward numerous years, now living back in Australia and feeling very privileged to be able to turn on a tap and have fresh water.  I was on the hunt for something we could do in workplaces that was real and tangible and filled with purpose that connected people back to their why.  I was searching for a teambuilding initiative, I stumbled on WaterWorks.com.au.

It is the brainchild of Matt Hendricks whose creative initiative plays out in the workplace.  Any workplace can get a facilitator to come in and do a team building exercise by getting their team to build a water filtration device that then gets sent to Uganda to help support up to 200 villagers with access fresh water.   To see a team, achieve this in a little more than an hour and to understand the kind of life changing impact that it has for others is something amazing.  To add to the feeling of satisfaction and contribution you register the photos of the team doing the exercise with a special tracking website called 3billion stories.

At any point in time the team can jump onto the website and see exactly where their filtration device is up to, see who it goes to including photos of the people in the community receiving it.  Suddenly you have a whole new level of feeling as though your afternoon has mattered.

Team building is something we love doing at Being More Human, but you are unlikely to find the same old same old, all of our team initiatives have a twist of somehow being good for other people while developing the competencies that you want to see in your team.

For us at Being More Human, there is nothing we love more than to be living our story in an authentic way and helping support your team and organisation in a way that is literally transforming the lives of people in Uganda and others.

If your workplace could benefit from a team building exercise like this (and help the people of Uganda to access clean water at the same time) then please book in for a session by emailing *protected email* or Nicci on *protected email*