Thankyou Water Takes on the Food Challenge

Youth-led Social Enterprise of the Year, Thankyou Water says it’s taking it to the next level, launching a new campaign to provide food and sanitary assistance in developing countries.

Thankyou Water, which has now been re-branded simply as Thankyou, has been providing safe drinking water in a number of international communities for four years, through the sale of its bottled water range in Australia.

Thankyou Water was named Youth-led Social Enterprise this year at the Social Traders inaugural Social Enterprise Awards in May 2013. 

Now, Co-founder Daniel Flynn says it’s time to ramp things up with an expansion of products to enable an expansion in the services they provided for communities in need.

"Thankyou has always been driven by impact. It took us three years to help 5,000 people gain access to safe water,” he said.

“A year on, we celebrated 15,000 people and now just eight months later, we've helped over 56,000 people obtain safe water access. It's exciting to see the rapid growth of the business, and in turn, the impact we're making, but we know it's time to really take it to the next level.”

During the past four years, the Thankyou team has visited a lot of communities overseas and has seen first-hand the many other issues people in these communities are facing.

“Water isn’t the only issue,” Flynn said.
“We’ve seen the need for solutions to other huge problems like malnutrition, lack of food security and low understanding of health and hygiene.

“When we visited these communities we saw how life changing water was but we also saw some other issues, massive issues that we couldn’t just walk away from.”

Former MasterChef contestant Callum Hann is also involved in the campaign, creating the food range.

Flynn said the purchase of the food products would contribute to long term sustainable food programs such as fish farms, cow banks or veggie patches and the purchase of hygiene programs would see hygiene training implemented.

“Hand in hand with our water projects is health and hygiene training,” he said.

“A combination of cleaning your hands with soap and clean water will reduce 45% of water related deaths.

“For every bottle of body product sold will provide one person with access to health and hygiene training.”

As with the water products, consumers will be able to track the work that takes place through their purchase.

Every product has a tracker code and includes gps co-ordinates and details of the projects that have been funded through each purchase.

Through the launch of this latest campaign, Thankyou is hoping to attract the support of supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths to get them to stock the Thankyou range- a partnership that the Thankyou team believes will allow them to take their community development work to the next level.

Watch the Thankyou youtube campaign.