Restaurants to participate in charity event

As part of World Water Week, which started Sunday and continues through Saturday, the University Coalition for Global Health and the IU chapter of UNICEF are partners in recruiting up to 70 local restaurants to participate in the nationwide Tap Project for the first time in Bloomington.

This “grassroots initiative” calls for restaurants to invite their customers to donate at least $1 during World Water Week for the tap water they normally get for free.

“Several of the officers came up with the idea last year,” said Jacob Walker, a member of the University Coalition for Global Health. “It worked well in other cities, and Bloomington seems like the kind of city that would be able to do that since there are so many restaurants, especially independently owned ones.”

But, things have not gone quite as well as planned for the University Coalition for Global Health and UNICEF in Bloomington.

Walker said it is difficult to convince restaurants to support campus groups they have never heard of, such as the global health coalition. Furthermore, many franchises will just assume they don’t have the authority to allow their location to participate in the Tap Project.

According to tapproject.org, the $1 can supply a child in an underdeveloped country with 40 liters of clean drinking water; enough for 40 days.

Nearly 900 million people do not have access to safe drinking water, a problem that is the second-largest killer of children under the age of 5, according to UNICEF.

The project began with 300 restaurants in New York in 2007 and became a nationwide effort last year, raising more than $855,000.

Because the Tap Project is just getting started this year, one of the group’s goals is to get everything streamlined to make the process easier and more effective next year.

“That way, we can have more restaurants and do more publicity next year,” Walker said.

“The Tap Project brings to Bloomington an incredibly simple concept to encourage restaurant patrons to help bring clean and safe water to the children of the world,” said Garrett Blumberg, president of the University Coalition for Global Health, in a press release. “It is our duty to use tap water – our single most bountiful resource – to reduce child mortality.”