On November 3, 2011, two sisters set up a table outside a Dallas Starbucks with a box of folded paper ornaments and a goal of five hundred dollars. Katherine Adams was five. Isabelle was eight. They had learned, in the way children learn things, all at once and completely, that there were children elsewhere who spent their days carrying water instead of going to school.
They sold out that night. By the end of the year they had raised just over ten thousand dollars, which was more than the well in Ethiopia was going to cost.
Fifteen years on, Paper for Water has raised more than four million dollars and funded 393 water projects across twenty countries, from Ethiopia and Kenya to Peru, Nepal and the Navajo Nation. More than 157,000 people have clean water because two children decided to fold paper.
They are still folding.
What is actually in your hand
Traditional origami is one sheet of paper, no cuts and no glue. What the Adams sisters make is something else, a modular form called kusudama, and it has more in common with architecture than with paper folding. A single ornament takes up to thirty separate sheets, each folded and then locked into the next without adhesive, until the whole thing holds itself together as a sphere, a star, a lily, a butterfly.
Thirty is a significant number, because it means almost nobody makes one alone. Volunteers sit around a table and work on a single ornament together. The organization's core group consists of a few dozen mothers and retired women who meet every Tuesday and call themselves the Paper Dolls. A second group, the Change Makers, is made up of Dallas middle school, high school and college students who run fundraisers and design installations. The youngest folders are under ten. The oldest are well into retirement.
The sisters learned the craft from their father, who is half Japanese.
Held up to a window, the finished pieces do what good design does, which is look inevitable. Patterned paper, a length of ribbon, sometimes a bead. Neiman Marcus put them in its Fantasy Gift Catalog on a sixteen-foot tree. The Four Seasons and NorthPark have both carried installations, and suspended pieces by the organization's volunteers have hung over the ice rink at Galleria Dallas.
Kisii County, in June
In late June the organization spent eleven days in Kenya, and the trip happened because of Mellen Onkanga. She grew up attending the Emenwa school in Kisii County, lives now in Dallas, and came looking for a partner who would help build a well in the community she came from. Much of her family is still there.
Emenwa has 732 students. It now has a well, a solar-powered pump, a purification system and taps. Before that, water came from distant streams and standing ponds.
Northeast of Nairobi, at a children's home called Upendo Kids Village, a well installed in 2023 has done something less obvious. About fifty children live there. The water irrigates fields of maize and sweet potato, a greenhouse of peppers and kale, and a pond of tilapia harvested twice a month. Food costs at Upendo have fallen by sixty percent, and the difference has gone into education. The dormitories now have solar water heaters. A social worker named Gift explained that since the hot water arrived, no child has had to be asked to bathe.
They also visited a pump at the Bishop Dan School, where 350 students no longer walk for water, and a system at Oyolla, built with NorthPark Presbyterian Church in Dallas after a council of local women asked for it, serving 250 people.
The team carried soccer balls to every stop. This year's theme is Freedom to Play, and the reasoning behind it is unglamorous and correct. A child who is not hauling water has time to be a child.
The instrument
There is a version of philanthropy that requires a foundation, a strategy, a staff and a board. This one required a card table and a father who knew how to fold paper.
It is worth sitting with that. The organization was started by a five-year-old and an eight-year-old and has been sustained for fifteen years, in large part, by people who show up on a Tuesday. Nobody in that room is a water engineer. What they have is thirty sheets of paper at a time and a long memory for why they started.
That is the quietly useful thing about an ornament. A check disappears into an account and is never seen again. A folded sphere hangs in a window where visitors ask about it, and the person who owns it gets to answer.
Thirty sheets make one. It has been enough, so far, for 393 water projects.
Paper for Water will bring a folding session to your home or office, and no experience is needed. Ornament trees are commissioned for homes and offices. For more information or to learn how you can help, visit paperforwater.org
"Thirty is a significant number, because it means almost nobody makes one alone."
"There is a version of philanthropy that requires a foundation, a strategy, a staff and a board. This one required a card table and a father who knew how to fold paper."