The idea came to him nearly six years ago as Jim Dudley sat reading “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.”
The book, subtitled “What I Learned While Editing My Life,” chronicles author Donald Miller’s transformation from a man living a stalled life to choosing to live with purpose.
For different reasons and with varying results, it happens to a lot of us, sociologists say.
At the time, Dudley was 30 years old, happily married to his wife, Allison, expecting the second of his four sons, and the owner of four metro Atlanta car washes. Reading Miller’s story, he realized that his life, too, lacked a storyline, a purpose.
“I just feel like God had blessed our family with a lot and we wanted to be good stewards of what had been entrusted to us,” he said the other day.
And so in the fall of 2008, he founded Wash Away Thirst to provide clean water to people living in developing nations.
According to sociologist Lori Brown, social media has helped better inform Americans of such international and environmental issues, thus fueling what has become an ever-growing trend toward using businesses as catalysts for social change.
“Unfortunately, the media doesn’t cover much in the news or online about local charities and the needs they have,” said Brown, professor and program coordinator of sociology at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. “When they do have media focus for specific events, people do give and turn out to support fundraising events.”
While the working poor tend to be far more generous than those who are wealthy when it comes to giving a proportion of their income, Brown said that Americans like Dudley in general believe in “helping” out.
Either way, she said, as a nation, giving makes us feel good, especially if “we are helping with a good cause or feel we are making a difference.”
Dudley, now 36, was finishing a series about people using what God had given them for something greater at his church, All Souls Fellowship in Decatur, when he learned that there were a lot of people in the world who didn’t have access to clean water.
Then friend Jeff Shinabarger invited Dudley and wife Allison to join him on a trip to Guatemala, where children and their mothers spend as many as four hours each day trekking across treacherous terrain in search of a few liters of water.
“I had never been to a Third World country,” Dudley said. “We went down, helped build some houses and handed out some water filters.”
That was in the spring of 2009.
“I was interacting with people who didn’t have clean water, playing with their kids, hearing the stories about how the filters had changed their lives,” Dudley said. “It wasn’t just statistics anymore.”
Back at home, Dudley got to work. For each car washed at his businesses — Wash Me Fast and Sky Wash Detail — he’d donate a portion of the cost toward providing clean water to the people of Guatemala.
Over lunch one day, he shared the details of his Clean Water Project and partnership with the Rotary with Gary Dennis, a member of the Chicago-based International Carwash Association’s board of directors.
Would you mind if I share with the board what you’re doing? Dennis asked.
A month later, Dudley got a $20,000 check in the mail. The association wanted to sponsor a pilot program in Atlanta to see if other car washes could get excited about his efforts and use the campaign to promote the industry and what it was doing to conserve water.
“The idea of providing clean water for a penny a day was an unbelievably cost-effective way to have a significant impact,” said Dennis, now president of the association. “From a selfish standpoint, because we’re in the car wash industry, we saw this as a way to address the misconception that we use and waste a lot of water. The opposite is true. We recycle and reuse 90 percent of the water we use.”
The men hired a company to build a website and another one to provide public relations and create logos and branding messages.
“Within a month, 80 car wash locations had signed up to help,” Dudley said. “At the end of the six-month campaign, we’d raised $30,000.”
Through their partnership with the Rotary, which matches fundraising up to four times the amount, that became $90,000, enough to provide San Jose El Yalu, a city of 2,520 people, with clean water.
Since 2008, employees at Dudley’s car washes alone have built 25 homes and passed out 50 filters.
Early this year, Dudley partnered with other local car washes to raise more than $7,000, money he split equally with SERV International and Just One Africa, both Atlanta-based nonprofits working to provide clean water in Kenya and the Dominican Republic.
Compared to the need, Dudley said his efforts will hardly solve the world’s water crisis.
But he said, “I remember (North Point Community Church Senior Pastor) Andy Stanley saying do for one what you wish you could do for many. That’s what we’re doing. I feel like we’re making a difference.”
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