Participating in an online campaign for Earth Day 40 that was observed on 22nd April, I have met quite a few people who are doing some great work in underprevileged communities for their betterment. One such mother-son duo is Barbara and Sunny Forsyth. Sunny has started Abundant Water, a sustainable project to create water filters in Laos. The project involves training the locals, the Lao people, to manufacture simple ceramic water filters to help them provide themselves potable water. After getting to know their work, I felt compelled to interview Sunny and share the brilliant project with my readers. Please click on the link below to listen to the interview.
aign for Earth Day 40 that was observed on 22nd April, I have met quite a few people who are doing some great work in underprevileged communities for their betterment. One such mother-son duo is Barbara and Sunny Forsyth. Sunny has started 
Babs Forsyth, Sunny's mother, looks after the social media aspect of this project and she's someone who has effectively used various social media platforms to spread the word about Abundant Water. I asked Babs, how has social media helped AW get the word out?
Her answer to my question was:
1 year ago I started tweeting for Abundant Water. I had no idea what I was doing or really even why but I kept at it posting updates from Sunny's work In Lao, having conversations with people I only 'knew' through Twitter and spreading the word about AW.
We have participated in a few Twitter Events:
1. Hugh Jackman's Twitter Challenge for Charity with the most votes - didn't win
2. Top10Causes Twitter Challenge for Charity with the most votes - got 3rd
3. Shorty Awards for best in many categories, in our case it was Health, AW was about 13th out of several 100.
It was in this challenge that I 'met' Michael Q Todd and decided to participate in the 40 Day Social Media Entrepreneurship Training Course he was organizing.
The AW network grew, people from every continent have offered help and this has certainly been accelerated by participating in the 40 Day Course. Sunny has been able to meet Radiance and be interviewed by her. He has also been interviewed on Blog Talk Radio and all of these events have helped to spread the word about Abundant Water. I think there is great potential here that we have only just started to explore.
It is also through social media that Sunny has been invited to talk at TEDxCanberra in October this year.
We are also looking to get involved with Buy1Give1 or a similar organization to help spread the word and generate fund for the work in Lao.
Parallel to Twitter we are also running AW Facebook Page which helps to keep our friends informed about events both in Canberra and Lao.
Thank you for this opportunity to talk about Abundant Water.
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3 comments:
What a wonderful project! Thank you so much for sharing this information. I went to the Abundant Water web site and found the pdf file that explains how the filter works, but I did not find a link to studies that verify the claims. Can you point me to them?
I'm also curious to know whether it filters contaminants other than E.coli and whether it needs to be purged periodically to maintain its filtering capacity. If so, how.
So many questions! I know. What a simple and wonderful concept.
Hi Kathryn, rather than me trying to answer your questions with the limited knowledge I have about the filters I'd rather direct you to AW themselves (namely, Sunny) with their email id abundantwater1@gmail.com ... I am sure Sunny will have answers to all your queries :) ... yes, indeed its a simple but powerful concept, more so as it empowers the locals to help themselves.
Thank you for the info, Radiance. I wrote a post about Abundant Water's clay filters today at <a href="http://bit.ly/abGSHv>http://bit.ly/abGSHv</a>. Hope this finds you well.
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