Chris and Leslie Rolling just moved into a new home, which is always an exciting chapter for a young family.
It’s in a nice kid-friendly neighborhood, has plenty of room and offers a big upgrade in energy efficiency.
And here is the biggest upside to the Rollings’ move in December: Each year, another 48,000 Haitians will have access to safe drinking water.
Chris and Leslie Rolling head the nonprofit Clean Water for Haiti, which makes low-tech water filters. So the relocation doesn’t just represent a new house. Each one of those move-in advantages also is part of a better production facility.
“Our capacity has doubled,” Chris Rolling said. If they can get a matching increase in funding, they will be able to make up to 400 filters a month. “We’re going to have to ramp it up.”
That is why Rolling is back in his hometown this week. The 1993 graduate of Hudson’s Bay High School is making presentations to three local Rotary clubs. Rolling will also talk to three Rotary clubs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the nonprofit has established an unexpected partnership.
His current visit marks a shift in goals. Acquiring and developing the new site was a five-year project. In 2015, “we worked like crazy,” Rolling said — often 70 hours a week on construction and filling a contract for 900 water filters.
The next big goal is building that funding base while expanding the nonprofit’s board of directors — people who can focus on raising money while Chris and Leslie Rolling run the operation.
While the new location is just 10 minutes from their previous site, it has been a huge step forward.
“It dropped our overhead way down. The previous area we were in had security issues. The security company we hired cost $1,200 a month.”
And the dicey neighborhood also meant that their children — 8-year-Olivia and 4-year-old Alex — couldn’t leave the yard.
Now their security cost is about $100 a month, Rolling said, and Olivia and Alex have a whole neighborhood to play in.
The new site also has a robust solar-power system. Since moving in, they’ve run their generator twice for a total of two hours.
“That saves another $400 a month or so in diesel fuel.”
Money is a factor because the Rollings sell their products at a loss. A filter costs about $100 to make and sells for about $4, he said.
The Rollings refer to their work as a mission. It’s a way to serve people who, as Rolling described it, get their drinking water from dirty ditches, muddy canals, shallow wells and contaminated streams.
There is nothing complicated about a filter. It is a 160-pound concrete box filled with 90 pounds of sand; a biological agent is added that can trap 95 to 100 percent of the disease-causing microbes. A filter can clean about 5 gallons of water in an hour.
“We know we’ve installed at least 24,000 filters since we started” in 2001, Leslie Rolling said in her blog. Every filter serves from eight to 10 people — the size of a typical Haitian household.
“Some are smaller, but in many cases people are also allowing friends and family to come and filter water at their home,” Leslie said.
In addition to clean water, the Rollings bring another valuable commodity to their part of the country: jobs.
Sixteen people work for Clean Water for Haiti. To call it the biggest employer in the area doesn’t tell the whole story, Rolling said: “We’re the only employer.”
