How One Small Idea Led to $1 Million of Paid Water Bills | Tiffani Ashley Bell | TED

One Thursday morning, several summers ago,

I woke up and started scrolling through social media

like so many of us do every morning.

What caught my eye that morning, though,

was an article about how 100,000 people in Detroit

were about to have to live without running water

because they couldn't afford their water bills.

And people have been living with this issue for a while.

And they get by.

They were doing everything from collecting rainwater in barrels

to walking to relative's houses to take showers every few days.

And much worse, sometime later,

I learned that a lot of people were actually losing custody of their kids

because they couldn't afford to pay their water bills.

Instead of someone helping them, they just lost their kids.

For many of them, their greatest transgression, you could argue,

was that they were either elderly, disabled,

had just been laid off

or worked jobs that simply didn't pay enough.

And yes, I said jobs.

And to me, how they were being treated

and the level of contempt shown to them

and how easy it was to simply deny them something that we all need to live

was disgusting.

(Applause)

It's disgusting.

But to me this also felt personal,

even though I have no direct family ties to Detroit.

And here's why.

Many of the people who were facing shut offs were Black.

Many were also like myself, Black women.

And Lord knows it's not the first time in the United States

that Black people have been denied basic human rights like water.

So to me, that created an overwhelming urge

to do something to help.

I mean, I couldn't just read that and then go on about my day.

Then it became a question of what can I,

sitting in my pajamas as one person at home, actually do?

Well, what?

Oh, oh, but wait.

I'm a programmer.

And a heavy, heavy social media user.

So I decided to tweet.

To tweet what I was reading about, what I was seeing, how I felt,

to my online community of activists, politicians,

start-up founders and investors.

Some like yourselves.

And other programmers, of course.

And over the course of a few hours of back and forth about what to do,

we resolved to do the simplest, most obvious thing

that would help somebody in this situation.

We decided to pay some water bills.

To do that, I skipped work that day.

I did not go to work that day.

And instead,

I spent a few hours digging around on the water company's website.

And I found something interesting

that sort of jump-started what to do for people.

For some reason, there was a 400-page PDF of customers on the website

that the water company couldn't deliver their bills to through the mail,

and some of these were delinquent accounts.

But one of the things that was interesting about this list

is that it also included account numbers for people.

So you just take one of those account numbers

and, at that time, plug it into the website

and see everything about that account.

So I did that.

And one of the things that was interesting, though, there,

was that I saw a "make a payment" button.

So the idea then became, what if we got the account numbers of people

that needed help and then made payments for them?

So a few hours later,

I built a website to find those people

and start connecting them to people that needed help.

And then I tweeted that.

And to keep things simple,

people who wanted to help

simply would get instructions on how to log onto the utility's website

as if they were the account holder

and just make payments.

And then once they had done that,

they would send us the receipts

and we would send those to the families that had gotten the help.

And empowered with those donations, with those payments,

they were able to go to the water company and advocate for themselves

and demand that their water be turned back on.

And in doing that,

that's how, in the first 40 or so days of doing this,

we paid over 100,000 dollars in water bills by just simply --

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

By just simply sending people directly to the utility company's website

to pay five dollars, 10 dollars.

Whatever they could afford.

And I don't say that to brag,

but instead to encourage you all

to notice problems

and to think about what is the simplest,

most obvious thing you can do to impact that problem.

So first, what I’ll also say that was true for us,

is that it should be abundantly clear that whatever you do

doesn't actually have to be perfect.

You don't have to do some big overarching thing like a nonprofit.

Because you won’t have all the answers when you start.

But what's beautiful about that

is that you don't actually need to have all the answers to get started.

And I will confess

that if we had had all the answers, if we had known too much,

we might not have actually gotten started.

So the next thing that's true is that ...

When you put together and you start doing something that's imperfect

and it's not finished,

people will see what you're doing and they'll want to join you.

They'll want to get together with you to make what you're doing bigger,

more impactful, more meaningful,

but all in ways unique to themselves.

For us, that was the city employees who answered our emails on weekends.

And then during the week,

drove people to appointments to get their water turned back on.

It was the people in mutual-aid groups and nonprofits

that partnered with us

to completely pay off the water bills for some families.

It was the people who actually really made this work possible

by giving five dollars, 10 dollars, 20 dollars,

some of whom had been in this situation themselves a few years prior,

where they couldn't afford their own bills, but they now could,

so they were generous about it.

It was the people who held bake sales

to help people that they didn't know

and would never meet.

People see you walking the walk,

and you'll understand that that compassion is contagious.

So I'd ask you in this moment then,

what is it

that sends you down a rabbit hole of blog posts and news articles?

What leaves you so disgusted and annoyed that you would rather skip work or class

and work on that instead?

What is that for you?

It's got to be something.

So suppose, for example,

you find out that the third graders at your old elementary school

owe lunch money debt?

What if the most obvious thing to do for them

is to pay off that lunch money debt,

sponsor some lunches, and then later on

go run for the local school board

to push for systemic change around access to nutrition at school?

That's just an idea.

Now you might hear this and say, "That's nice, it's cute,

but I don't really have time for that."

Or "Most problems are too big to work on, so why bother?"

I'll say you're not unique in thinking that at all.

But if we just stick with the idea of doing the smallest at first,

the most obvious thing,

and just think about for a second,

what do you have the time,

what do you have the resources,

what do you have the skills and the influence, even, to do?

To make happen.

For me, I was a programmer with a whole day job,

so I didn't actually initially have time to work on this all day either.

But using the skills and the resources and the network that I did have,

we built out the original website and then grew it from there.

So the next somewhat obvious

but I think hasty criticism that we sometimes hear

is that what we did was just a band-aid.

That whatever you end up doing is not going to be significant enough

is not going to make a difference,

it's too fleeting of a thing to try to do to make a difference.

But is it not that the purpose of a band-aid is to give an injury,

a place where something has gone wrong,

the opportunity to heal?

I'll say no,

initially, we weren't going to solve

the root of why people couldn't afford their water bills.

And I'm not here to tell you either

that benevolent strangers sitting at home in their pajamas

are a proper substitute for systemic structural changes to issues.

But what I will tell you, though,

is that also, our solution didn't attack the poverty,

it didn't attack the unemployment,

it didn't attack the bad public policy.

Yes, bad public policy

that enthusiastically punishes people who are poor,

especially when they are Black or brown.

But what we did give people,

yes, what we did give people in that moment is relief.

So again, whatever you do,

if it's small and if it's an obvious thing,

it doesn't mean that your impact can't actually be durable.

And that you shouldn't try to do something.

And I say that because today,

we have helped over 5,000 people with water bill payments just from --

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Just from people again, giving five dollars, 10 dollars, 50 dollars

whatever they can afford to contribute.

And our ripples of compassion have actually gone even further.

We got a major American city to start offering more compassionate assistance.

We had a US member of Congress and their office reach out to get help

for their constituents.

We've had policymakers in three different states

that we were able to help using our data, our knowledge,

our experience

to understand what's happening around water affordability

in their districts.

We've also been able to partner with other nonprofits

and mutual aid groups

to keep families from facing eviction, homelessness over their water bills.

We've also been able to help families avoid facing the threat

of losing their kids.

I also now do this work full time

with the goal of helping utilities understand

how to make water more affordable,

make water more of a human right,

so that people also don't fall behind on their bills in the first place.

Legendary comedian Lily Tomlin once said,

"I always wondered why people wouldn't do something about that.

Why somebody wouldn't do something about that.

Then I realized I was somebody."

So you don't even actually have to be a programmer to make a difference

or even do what I did.

You just have to be, like Lily said, to be somebody.

Somebody who sees a thing that can be fixed,

can be impacted,

and do that.

Do something.

Thank you.

(Applause and cheers)