Matt Damon knows what he’s up against. For two decades, the actor-writer-producer has been leveraging his clout to raise money and awareness to fight the global water crisis. Today, more than 88 million people in the developing world have access to clean and safe drinking water and sanitation thanks to Water.org, the nonprofit aid organization he founded in 2009 with engineer-turned-philanthropist Gary White.
But in the crowded and ruthless attention economy of social media, it’s harder than ever to get a message through the noise, even if your cause is worthy and you’re the A-list star of a guaranteed summer blockbuster. Which explains why the promo campaign for Water.org’s new ethical-consumerism project Get Blue features Matt Damon, 55, in the studio with famed hip-hop producer Hit-Boy, calling himself “The Nomad”—yes, that’s “Damon” spelled backwards—and rapping.
Or, more accurately, trying to rap—because these days, when it comes to “raising awareness,” ever-more-algorithmic times call for increasingly ingenious algorithm-baiting methods, including the self-owning spectacle of Matty on the mic.
Damon notes that even 20 years ago, getting people to pay attention to water poverty was a struggle. “That very first hurdle to clear,” he says, “is making it relatable. It’s a headwind that other issues don’t have. If you’re raising money for cancer research or AIDS research, people are all connected. They’re one degree away from somebody in their family or in their friend group who’s experienced this firsthand. Whereas with this, it’s not something that we contend with in our daily lives here…You’re talking about a completely different way of living that most of us just are not aware of.”
Water poverty isn’t solely a developing-world issue—according to the United States Geological Survey, access to clean water is also an issue for about 26.7 million Americans, or roughly 8% of the U.S. population. But for most of us, the problem of water access “was solved a hundred years ago,” Damon says. “Maybe you have a grandparent or a great-grandparent who didn’t have indoor plumbing, but by and large, we’re always a few steps away from a clean drink of water. So I was really amazed at how massive the problem is in the developing world. It’s over two billion people who don’t have access to safe water. That’s one in four human beings. 20 years ago, when I first started looking at all this stuff, that was what surprised me the most.”
A project like Get Blue, Damon says, are “all about trying to create awareness, and a movement, and a method of engagement for everybody. Once you start to describe the scale of the problem—first of all, it’ll make you feel helpless because of the size of it. And so to be able to provide an on-ramp for people to engage with it and know that they’re actually affecting meaningful change is the whole reason why we’re trying to do this.”
GQ: Matt, you’ve been working in this space since 2006, when you started the H20 Africa Foundation. How has your approach changed since you partnered up with Gary to start Water.org?
Matt Damon: [Early on] I did what a lot of people do—what we call “direct impact” work, which was just trying to raise money for NGOs that were building wells in places and bringing water to people that way. And [I] pretty quickly realized that, A, there was not enough philanthropy in the world to solve this, and B, that that method alone was not going to be sufficient, or even close to it. And so that was when I really started to try to be more strategic about partnering with somebody who really understood the space, and I scoured the space for the preeminent expert and that’s how I wound up with Gary.
