BC Business
For small businesses that want to make a social impact, Yvonne Anderson has one piece of advice: Get started. "Everybody waits, thinking, Oh, when I get a bit bigger, when I get this, when I do that, I will start," says the co-founder and CEO of Santevia Water Systems. "No. Start now, no matter what your budget is." Anderson and her husband, David, did just that when they founded Delta-based Santevia in 2008...
With its partner Acts for Water, Santevia Water Systems has provided almost 10,000 years of clean water for people in Uganda
For entrepreneurs who want to make a social impact, Yvonne Anderson has one piece of advice: Get started.
“Everybody waits, thinking, Oh, when I get a bit bigger, when I get this, when I do that, I will start,” says the co-founder and CEO of Santevia Water Systems. “No. Start now, no matter what your budget is.”
Anderson and her husband, David, did just that when they founded Delta-based Santevia in 2008—first by helping young people avoid sex slavery before pivoting to global water poverty. “We started it because I personally needed a real purpose for the company beyond making money,” she says of the Delta-based business, which specializes in alkaline water filters. “We managed to help people with their health and at the same time give back.”
To that end, via a partnership with Richmond charity Acts for Water, Santevia provides 100 days of clean water to a person in Uganda for every pitcher and gravity water system sold. For Giving Tuesday on December 1, Santevia has launched a campaign as part of Acts for Water’s Jerry Can Project. Through this GoFundMe effort, the company aims to raise $1,000 from friends and family. When Santevia matches their donation, the $2,000 total will be enough to give four Ugandan families clean, safe water for life.
“This will be the first time we’ve engaged our greater audience, our friends and family, all of this, to see if they want to actually engage with us in our philanthropy,” Anderson says.
Given that one in three people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, the need is urgent. As Anderson explains, many people in developing countries—mostly girls and women—walk long distances with jerry cans and other containers to gather water. The water is usually polluted, and getting it takes so long that those girls and women can’t attend school and be productive members of society. Plus, it carries water-borne illnesses, so people have to pay for medicine, Anderson says. “This keeps them in what we call the cycle of poverty.”
The Andersons launched Santevia in their early retirement. Yvonne was previously a kinesiology consultant, while David is an accountant. They opened the business as part of David’s switch to an “alkaline lifestyle” that cured his chronic acid reflux, his wife explains. When the couple searched for naturally mineralized alkaline water, their only choices were expensive products from multilevel marketing companies. Spotting a niche, they decided to start a small online business selling countertop water filters.
Today, Santevia has a 12,500-square-foot manufacturing and office facility, 16 full-time employees and 25 or 30 salespeople on the road, Anderson says. The company, which sells throughout Canada and the U.S., recently entered the U.K. market. “We brought in a very unique product at a very attractive price at exactly the right moment,” says Anderson, who also observes that consumers were becoming more health-conscious and looking for alternatives single-use plastic water bottles.
The launch of Santevia coincided with a business conference the Andersons attended in Thailand, where delegates learned about the horrors of the country’s sex slavery industry. “It was shocking, when you went on a nighttime tour, to see how this was impacting young girls, and sometimes young boys, 12 to 20,” Anderson recalls.
That experience proved to be a turning point. “What I realized was, I had enough energy to go another round in business if there was a really strong purpose.” So the couple started sponsoring orphanages that gave desperately poor children in northern Thailand a safe place to live, receive an education and get a start in life. “We’re now sponsoring three orphanages in Thailand and a school in Bangladesh, and we have our water projects throughout the world,” Anderson says.
Santevia launched its 100 Days of Water effort in 2019, after focusing on Thailand for a decade. “I believe that the way philanthropy and the way we as a social business work most effectively is to find a project and commit to it for 10 years,” Anderson says. “Because these little two-year blips, we can’t have an impact.”
When it comes to water poverty, Anderson concentrates on the United Nations’ WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) programs. The UN has made great strides to reduce world hunger, she notes. “Now our focus is on clean drinking water, because at the same time as we’ve actually reduced the number of people starving in the world, we’ve increased the number of people who do not have access to clean drinking water.”
In Uganda, to gain access to disused wells, Santevia’s partner Acts for Water is making gravity flow water systems that are built by local engineers from local materials and maintained locally, Anderson says. So far, Santevia has given 9,540 years of clean water, with a goal of 100,000 years by 2030. “I hope we can have as great an impact over the next 10 years on water poverty as we had with the sex slavery situation in Thailand.”
Anderson encourages small businesses to choose a charity they’re passionate about and make donating to it part of their balance sheet. “Plan not just your business plan but your giving plan,” she says. “I don’t care if you start with $100—start.”
Companies that promote their giving on social media and elsewhere will find themselves rewarded, she adds. “People start looking and going, Hey, I want to engage with that company because they give,” Anderson says. “So you will actually grow your business at the same time you grow your social enterprise. It’s like a basic law of the world: when we give, we get.”