2009-2010: Dartmouth For Clean Water (DCW) Initial grant of $9,000 with a follow-up of $1,900 in 2012 in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and cholera epidemic.
DCW was founded on 2009 by Pratyaksh “Prat” Srivastava ’12, who concluded one of the greatest challenges facing the world is lack of safe drinking water. He and other students formed a Dartmouth student philanthropic organization to do something about it with small solar-powered water filtration units made in Ohio to be sent to villages in Haiti outside the capital of Port Au Prince.
This was fortuitously awarded at Homecoming in 2009 and the order for the units placed before the monumental earthquake of January 12, 2010! The initial three water purification units arrived shortly after the quake and were placed under supervised use at the elementary schools in the villages of Thomazeau (450 students and their families), Jounau (300 families), and at Merceron (600 families) and were credited with saving thousands of lives during the ensuing cholera epidemic! Prat, incidentally, with a continuing interest in public health, went straight from Dartmouth to Harvard Medical School, where he was elected president of his class.