Kansas City makes it easy to lose faith in people. Elected officials often act like schoolchildren. In the local corporate world, job-shredding incompetents outnumber innovators. A list of the metro's 200 most repulsive inhabitants would include a fair number of clergy.
But every once in a while, someone so decent ... so breathtakingly effective ... emerges from the heap of mediocrity that passes for leadership in KC.
Gary White is an engineer by training and a Catholic relief worker at heart. Twenty years ago, he took on a mission to improve access to clean water and sanitation in the developing world. His initial fundraiser took place at a Knights of Columbus hall along the Blue Ridge Cutoff. The day-after-Thanksgiving dinner raised $4,000 for a water project in Honduras.
Today, White is the executive director and co-founder of a standard-setting nonprofit called Water.org. The other co-founder? Matt Damon. White met Damon at a 2008 meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. Damon was already involved in relief efforts through the H2O Africa Foundation, which he created in 2006. The actor liked White's ideas. H2O Africa made a grant to WaterPartners, the organization that White had started with the help of St. Bernadette's Catholic Church.
White and Damon stayed in touch. White says Damon is "incredibly knowledgeable about the water and sanitation crisis."
The engineer and the movie star eventually came to a decision to merge their nonprofits into Water.org. Through H2O Africa, Damon had the ability to tell a story and raise money. White, meanwhile, could deliver results. "We really knew how to get stuff done on the ground," he says.
Damon's quiet sidekick is Kansas City engineer Gary White, right. Their organization is based downtown.
Today, White says, groups working to meet the safe-water challenge don't get involved without training, cost-sharing and hygiene components. All of that, he says, is "a price of entry."