Chris Rolling Email & Phone Number

Almost all of my experience has been in building and running a household water treatment project in Haiti. Part of directing this project involved managing employees in a cross-cultural context and solving problems cross-culturally. Many lives have been saved because of the successful implementation model we developed and this is far and away my most successful career achievement.

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  Executive Director

  Clean Water For Haiti

  Jan 2004 - Present - Camp Mary, Haiti

  Clean Water for Haiti was founded in 2001, and I started working with the organization in 2003. I was asked to take over as director and took on that position in early 2004. In this role, I was able to sustainably grow Clean Water for Haiti's household water treatment (HWT) program from a very basic level into a well-oiled machine that eventually provided safe drinking water to hundreds of thousands of rural Haitians. "Empowering, Improving, Sustaining" is Clean Water for Haiti's motto. "Empowering" regards the nature of a household water treatment project in a developing country like Haiti. A community infrastructure project requires a stable political environment. Without that, families lose access to safe water and have no recourse. With the CWH program, families are empowered to take control over the water they drink. This is provided both with the technology of the biosand filter itself and with the education that is an intrinsic part of the program. "Improving" was key to success at CWH. I knew that the best ideas were most likely to be had by Clean Water for Haiti's technicians, not the director. I referred to our meetings as "Kaizan Light". The format included two parts: identifying problems and offering potential solutions. The only rule was that the only bad idea was the idea that didn't get shared. The process not only improved the CWH biosand filter program, but it empowered the technicians to think independently. "Sustaining" refers to a goal which always needs to be the focus of development projects. An early Improvement was to create a follow up and education program that involved multiple visits to every household which received a filter. This enabled us to provide repeated education and to track the continued usage rate of the filters and when necessary to identify problems with our process. Over time, the continued usage rate increased to a very high level, implying a very high sustainability score for the project.

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  Western Washington University

  Industrial And Product Design