Alice Murphy works in Just a Drop’s Fundraising team as the Corporate Partnerships and Events Manager. She manages our corporate partnerships and oversees our events portfolio.
Tell us about your role at Just a Drop
Our corporate partnerships are all unique, as they’re designed to suit the differing interests and needs of our partners, and so this means it’s a varied job. A typical day might involve putting together proposals for new projects, helping partners communicate the impact of their support to employees, or writing reports to update on a project’s progress. I’ve also helped develop initiatives like PPHE Hotel Group’s Ecological Programme, taken part in office fundraising bike rides, and even created an online carol concert.
Alongside this, I run Just a Drop’s event portfolio, helping our partners to develop fundraising events, leading on our key events like our charity Golf Day and World Travel Market activities, and co-ordinating with conferences and events when Just a Drop is lucky enough to be named their charity partner.
In my role, I also dedicate a lot of time to learning about our projects and the communities we work with, to make sure I can report back accurately to our partners. I’m certainly not a hydrogeologist, but I’ve learned more about hydrogeology than I ever expected!
What’s your favourite thing about working for Just a Drop?
I love taking our partners out to see the impact of the projects they’ve supported. It’s great to see our work in action, but it also gives you a sense of perspective. When I visited Zambia in 2024, I knew about the human-wildlife conflict that was occurring due to elephants using the same river as the local communities – the elephants had moved inland because their usual water sources had dried up – but it was so different actually visiting villages where people had been killed by elephants, or where people’s entire livelihoods had been destroyed because elephants had walked through their crops.
The impact of our work here was so direct and immediate: we’d drilled a borehole which meant people no longer had to go down to the river, which reduced their contact with the elephants. Being able to see that firsthand, and hear from people about how the work that we’d supported was changing their lives, had a massive impact on me.
I love taking our partners out to see the impact of the projects they’ve supported.
Out of all my visits though, there’s one moment that’s always stuck with me. When I visited a sand dam project supported by Atlas Copco Group in Kenya, I saw a lady in her 80s named Esther who was slowly pushing this wheelbarrow back and forth to the sand dam site to transport rocks. I went to speak to her, and she said to me, look, I’m old and I’m frail, but I want my grandchildren to know I was part of this. There were groups of people running past her and moving much bigger equipment, and Esther was following them at her own pace saying, ‘I’ve got to be involved because this is going to change my community’.
That’s my other favourite part of working at Just a Drop: the work we do matters. I think it’s quite rare for an organisation to be able to back themselves in every way. But we can confidently say to all our supporters, here’s the information about the project we’re going to run; if it changes, we’ll tell you; and we can account for every penny that we spend. That transparency is important for our corporate partners, but it also means a lot to me, as a member of staff, to be able to recognise the impact I’m having and the importance of that.
How does your work support Just a Drop’s mission?
We couldn’t do what we do without the support of our corporate partners, and my role is to make sure these partnerships are effective and smooth-running.
One of the things that we’re really keen on is mutual benefit: we want to make sure that, when we receive funding or support from our partners, they see the benefit of that as well. Before we start a new partnership, we always meet with them, find out exactly what they want to get out of it – and, as much as we can, we work with them to make that happen.
What are you most proud of?
For us, as for everyone, the Covid-19 pandemic was a challenging time, but it was also eye-opening. At Just a Drop, our main focus is hand-washing, sanitation, and water – and the way to prevent Covid from spreading was to wash hands and use clean water and soap. Within about 24 hours of going into lockdown, we came together as an organisation and set up a Covid response programme to support our country partners and the local communities with things like hand-washing facilities, soap, and PPE.
Many of the communities we worked with were at high risk of catching Covid. In Uganda, for example, the majority of the local populations were farmers, and if they couldn’t go outside to farm or sell their crops, then they wouldn’t have any income or food. To help ensure that businesses could remain open, we provided hand-washing stations across marketplaces.
We also worked with our country partner in Uganda, Voluntary Action for Development (VAD), to distribute hygiene messages. As so many people lived in remote areas, this meant they weren’t receiving government instructions and advice, so they were unknowingly putting themselves at risk when they went out. VAD created posters and flyers with the Ugandan Ministry of Health messaging on it, and, with our help, they distributed these among the local communities. As many people couldn’t read or write, we also bought a motorbike and a big sound system, and VAD went round the communities to broadcast these messages. It was an amazing project to be a part of.
And our corporate partners were amazing. We’d come up with this programme without knowing if anyone would actually be able to fund it – and we knew this was a difficult time for so many organisations – but still our partners recognised the importance of the work and came together to support the programme. Those who couldn’t provide financial support ran quizzes, took part in solo marathons, and organised other fundraising activities. It truly was a team effort. And to top it off, we won the Rathbone’s Covid-19 Response Award at The Charity Awards for the part we played in mitigating the impact of the virus.
What do you hope the future holds for Just a Drop?
One of the things that I really love about our work is the support we give to enterprise. When communities have access to water, people – usually women and girls – can use the time they once spent collecting water on more meaningful activities such as attending school or working. To help people build on the fact they have access to water, we run a programme in Uganda, and more recently in Kenya, where we provide small loans (up to £40 per person) and teach community members about enterprise and bookkeeping so they can use their extra time to support their families financially. Many of the participants buy a stall in the local market to sell their crops, but others have set up hairdressing salons and even created dried grass carpet businesses – using the tools at their disposal to lift themselves out of poverty.
I’d love for us to continue our work in this area and ensure that, across our projects, water is the start, but not the finish.
I’d love for us to continue our work in this area and ensure that, across our projects, water is the start, but not the finish.