💧 Water versus Wheels: Re-imagining Corporate Volunteering - A Salon with Mandy Freeman🚲
💧 Salon with Mandy Freeman & Chris Jarvis — Water > Wheels: Re-imagining Corporate Volunteering 🚲
🔥 What’s This About?
Why run another feel-good bike build that may gather dust when the same 45-minute effort can keep a family drinking clean water for a decade? Wine To Water’s Filter Build® invites employees to assemble a compact, WHO-evaluated hollow-fiber filter that delivers ≈ 100,000 gal (≈ 380,000 L) of safe water over ten years. Swapping wheels for water turns a one-off volunteer day into a transformative experience that rewires empathy pathways and scales purpose.
🧑🤝🧑 Meet Your Guest Presenter
Mandy Freeman — Senior Program Manager, Wine To Water
Senior Program Manager at Wine To Water
Facilitated 400 + corporate Filter Build® events across 30 countries
Leads disaster deployments through the WTW Response Corps
Featured in the Filter Build® highlight reel
Connect on LinkedIn
🔍 What We’ll Dig Into
From transactional to transformative — why bikes often stop at “done,” while filters spark sustained solidarity
The empathy gap — 785 million people still lack basic drinking-water access; filters make that crisis visceral
Neuroscience of change — hands-on crisis solutions build new neural pathways for prosocial behavior
Cost-vs-impact math — one US $75 kit, 10-year lifespan, disaster-ready deployment
Flexible formats — in-person, virtual, and hybrid builds that fit any workforce
🧭 Salon Format
Spark Talk — Mandy & Chris weave narrative and data (15 min)
Design Challenge — re-write a classic bike-build agenda (or similar) into a Filter Build® blueprint (35 min)
Group Synthesis — surface blockers, metrics, and next steps (10 min)
🎯 Why You’ll Love It
Deeper engagement — volunteers move from charity to shared purpose, boosting retention and culture
Long-term impact — one filter keeps families healthy, kids in school, and communities resilient for ten years
Share-worthy visuals — filters headline better than warehouses of half-used bikes
📚 Resources
Filter Build® Event Page — program details & impact stats
Filter Assembly Guide (PDF) — step-by-step specs & QC process
WHO Evaluation Scheme — health-based criteria for household water-treatment technologies
Global Water Facts (WHO/UNICEF) — latest data on drinking-water access
2-min Highlight Reel — corporate Filter Build® in action
🔮 Next Steps
Watch some of the videos to get a sense of the scale and impact.
Skim the Filter Assembly Guide and jot one burning question.
Invite a colleague from HR or Comms to broaden the conversation.
✨ Final Reflection
“When teams trade handlebars for hollow-fiber filters, they stop assembling things for communities and start building change with them.”
Join us and turn corporate volunteering into a tap that never runs dry.