In this Skucast episode, Bobby Lehew interviews Dave Schultz, Vice President of Supplier Partnerships at Commonsku, about the PromoCares "Water for Good" initiative. PromoCares, an all‑volunteer organization within the promotional products industry, partnered with the US‑based Planet Water Foundation to fund and construct Aqua Towers—community water filtration and hand‑washing stations—in the impoverished, high‑altitude village of San José del Rincón, home to the indigenous Mazahua people. The campaign, launched in April‑May and originally targeting $50,000 for two towers, raised $175,000, enabling the construction of six to seven towers, including a cluster near S&S Activewear’s Toltec plant. Funding came from drinkware suppliers pledging a percentage of sales, a t‑shirt fundraiser, and direct corporate donations. Schultz and a small team traveled to Mexico, describing the challenging logistics of shipping pre‑fabricated tower components from Vietnam, the hands‑on assembly process, and the cultural immersion with the community. The episode highlights the tangible impact on clean drinking water and hygiene education, the broader industry’s rallying around social‑environmental responsibility, and future mechanisms for supporting such causes through searchable sustainability filters in Commonsku’s platforms and the Promocares.org directory.
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Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew. About 3 hours outside Mexico City is a small village, San José del Rincón, one of the poorest municipalities in the state of Mexico. It's a community about 10,000 feet or 2 miles above sea level. If you've ever wondered where those beautiful monarch butterflies migrate each year, it's here, in the heart of the Oyamel forests. The local indigenous people are the Matsawa. The kids in the community are actually taught both Spanish and the Matsawa language. There are only about 150,000 speakers of their language in the world. Now, what does this have to do with promo? Well, the song you are hearing in the background is from the kids in the Del Rincon community. Singing their national anthem because of an incredible initiative born within the industry. And for the SkewCast this week, since many of you are starting to celebrate the holidays with friends and family and turning your attention to gratitude and giving, we thought we would share this inspiring story about how one small industry with a very big heart has made an impact on one community in central Mexico. Promocares is an all-volunteer driven organization. Their mission is to inspire, educate, and provide actionable strategies to encourage social environmental responsibility in the promotional products industry. Each year, the board at Promocares picks a new initiative called their For Good events to rally the industry around a cause and use the collective energy of suppliers, distributors, and service providers to make an impact on the world. Now, according to UN and UNICEF data, 57% of households in Mexico lack access to a safely managed water supply. And 43% lack safe sanitation. This year, Promocare partnered with Planet Water Foundation. Planet Water Foundation is a US-based nonprofit organization committed to bringing clean water to the world's most disadvantaged communities through the installation of community-based water filtration systems and the deployment of hygiene education programs. Promocare came up with a goal to connect drinkware suppliers in the industry to a cause that would support clean water for communities that lack a safe water supply. What began as a small idea turned into a really big initiative and a beautiful collaboration that directly impacted the community at San Jose del Rincón. The Promocare board consists of Roger Burnett with Social Good Promotions, Carrie Cowden with Connected Dots Promotions, Meg Erber with S&S Activewear, Kate Nash with Raining Rose, Scott Pearson with 6 AM Sourcing, Danny Rosen with Brand Fuel, Mandy Rudd with Brand Energy Marketing, Denise Tashro with Fareware, and Commonsku's own Dave Schultz, who traveled to Mexico with a small contingency of Promocare's team members to help build the water towers and who is joining us today to share this story. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. Today's episode is brought to you by Commonsku, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonskew.com. Now here's my chat with Common Skew's Vice President of Supplier Partnerships, Dave Schultz. Dave, welcome back to the SkewCast. When did you start the Water for Good campaign?
Good morning, Bobby. We— so the Promo Cares Board The last couple of years we've done some sort of campaign. You know, 2 years ago it was mental health. Last year it was raising money for the Ukraine. And this year it was decided to do something to partner with Water for Good or with Planet Water. And the campaign was live roughly from April, May through the end of June, July. Of course, the money is still coming in, but that was the original official time frame. Yeah.
What was your— what were your initial hopes? What did you think? You know, we hope to raise X amount.
It's about $20,000 to $25,000 to do an install of one of these Aqua Towers that plant water plants.
Okay. So, that's the cost, the base cost.
Yup. And, our goal was to raise $50,000 and to fund 2 of these things in underserved areas in Mexico. And, by the time the campaign closed at the end of June, we were at about $100,000. And then, about a month and a half later, we were at $150,000 and 2 days ago, CJ called and said, "Yeah, we sold a bunch more drinkware. We're gonna throw in another $25,000." Oh, that's amazing. So today the campaign sits at $175,000.
Wow, that's amazing. CJ at HitPromo, by the way, just to clarify who that is. What did this campaign look like? These were donations from distributors, suppliers, service providers. You had a t-shirt sale with the "Water is a human right" on the front.
We did, wearing it right now.
Awesome.
Yeah, so the original idea was to kind of tie it into our supplier partners out there, particularly the ones that are involved in the drinkware category and just say, you know, why don't you pick a couple of drinkware pieces and commit, you know, a couple of percent of sales of those drinkware pieces during the campaign to this campaign. And so that's what most of the suppliers did. They picked 1 or 2 drinkware pieces, they committed to say 2% of sales. Hit was a little bit different. They said, ah, we're just gonna do all drinkware sales. So they committed to every drinkware piece sold, 2% during that campaign.
Oh, that's fantastic.
And then how S&S got involved was because they have one of their facilities in Mexico, their Toltec plant. They were interested in, in building some water towers in that area where their employees at the Toltec plant live. Right. So they got involved even though they don't sell drinkware, they got involved because of their, their, the location of their facility in Mexico.
And did I read right that that's going to be in the plans for 2024?
It is. Yeah. So we raised so much money that we have enough funding now to build 6 or 7 of these towers instead of the 2 we had planned on.
Wow.
So the, the donation from S&S and Toltec's, they really wanted to put towers in the area affected by their employees. Yeah. So there's going to be a cluster of 3 towers that are built near the Toltec's plant in Mexico.
Well, more than just raising funds, Promocare supporters, board members, and other folks actually traveled to Mexico, including yourself, to actually build the tower. So, Dave, what was that like? What was that like when you first landed and got there? You landed in Mexico City and traveled where?
Yeah, it was great. And it was kind of a last-minute thing. Like, the sites came up and there's 9 of us on the Promocare board. And, you know, one by one, everybody's like, well, you know, my kids are coming home next week, you know. So in the very end, you know, as the empty nester of the bunch, no kids or dogs at home at the moment, I was like, sure, I'll get on a plane tomorrow and fly to Mexico and help build this thing. So Scott Pearson with 6 AM Sourcing, he, and he got his kids involved. So two of his kids, Chase and Paris, joined us and the four of us flew into Mexico City, met some of his business partners who live there to help with this. And then the initial site was in a small town called Rincón del Ligadero, I believe you pronounce it.
That sounds good, Dave.
Yeah, San José de Ricon, which is basically the western, very western edge of the state of Mexico. So it was about a 3, 3.5-hour drive on some pretty sketchy roads there for a while, right, to this small school in this, in this local community out there is where the first one went in. Wow.
Well, when you got there, what was the community like? Can you paint us a picture?
Yeah, it's, it's super fascinating because it's, it's a, it's a local indigenous community. So, you know, the, the, it's the Mazahua people, and they've been around since before the Aztecs and ultimately were subjugated by the Aztecs and later the Spanish conquest of Mexico. But they've retained a lot of the original traditions and the dress. The women were dressed in these beautiful pleated satin-looking outfits, and all the boys, the little kids in the school, had these very intricate hand-stitched shirts they were wearing. So those are some of the traditions from that culture that have continued out in that part of the country. And it was just, you know, we rolled into this school not knowing what to expect. And all of the moms of the kids had, they had come out to make breakfast for us and they had all these pastries and they made us this hot, it's called a tole. It's like a breakfast drink that they make with maize and some sweeteners and cinnamon and vanilla and such. It's kind of like a thick. Almost like a thick hot chocolate that they drink to kind of keep them warm because we were up at close to 10,000 feet above sea level. So yeah, they came out and made us breakfast and then we started building the tower from there.
And I'd actually read that that community is one of the poorest municipalities in the state of Mexico, as I mentioned in the intro. So you started building the towers. What was that like, experience of actually building the tower?
It's, you know, as a kid that grew up playing with Legos and erector sets, it's, you know, I love it. I love to get my hands hands dirty. And it's like, sure, I'm gonna get some wrenches and we're gonna put this thing together. And they— the parts for these towers, I'm trying to remember exactly where they're— they're actually manufactured in Vietnam, I believe, and they ship them here. And the entire tower itself, minus the reservoir, the water reservoir that goes on top, basically is packed down into 2 crates that fit on a pallet. And so they ship these all around the world. I think they're building about 300 of these a year around the world at the moment. Planet Water is.. And so, you know, it's very, very well organized. There's about 5 folks from Planet Water there that were explaining what to do, how to put it together. And as a team, we all kind of came together and took certain parts of this tower on and ultimately took all of us to raise this thing up into the air and put it on a pallet and bolt it into the ground.
What's phenomenal about that is the hands-on, like someone from the Promocare community, several people going to actually hands-on and do this. What were you sort of expecting going in and then what was it the reality of it like?
Well, you know, I think with any philanthropic initiative, the ability to see what it is that you're supporting is super important. You know, in another life, I sit on the Big Slick board in Kansas City, which is a fundraiser for Children's Mercy. And one of the things that's very unique about that is we take our celebrity guests to the hospital to play games with the kids that are going through chemotherapy and such. It just, it makes it so much more impactful. So for us to be able to walk into this community and help build this tower, and at the end of the day, see these kids drinking clean water and having fun and toasting each other. And it's, it's just a really neat way to see what you're at, what impact you're making.
Yeah. Speaking of what, what impacted you the most, like what left the most indelible impression on you as you, as you now have come back and settled and back to your routine, but, but it still remains with you.
Yeah, I just, I think seeing them all come out to see, because they historically, the, the water that they have there is coming straight out of a well out of the ground. It's not cleaned in any way. And seeing the kids when we got there, they do have, they do have toilets there, but they're manually filling these toilets with buckets of water to flush them. You know, they're drinking water out of the ground. And so for them to be a big aspect of this was, was education, right? So teaching them about the proper ways to wash your hands and when you should wash your hands. And so the tower itself is twofold. It's one to encourage them to wash their hands, you know, before and after eating and after activities and things like that, but also for drinking water. So just to, you know, to see the whole community come out and be excited about it and knowing that that tower is going to be there for at least 5 years, but probably 10 or more, providing clean water was really cool.
What a phenomenal impact this industry can make when they do things like this and put their creative imagination to work. And from, as you mentioned, from the press release about the generous support, generous support of S&S Activewear and Tooltex, there, there's this new cluster and a 3-year endeavor to construct Aqua Towers in that area. It's, it's amazing to, to know that the, some of the merchandise we're selling has just a direct impact and it's, you can actually close the loop on that.
It is. Yeah. It's, it's really been fun to see when we started the Promocares board 6, 7 years ago. It was just simply to kind of shout out the names of folks that were doing these kinds of things. And now you're seeing, you know, both ASI and PPI have gotten on board. Their search engines now have filters for this kind of things. And, and all of these, you know, not just Hit and S&S, but we had Alpha Broader, Raining Rose, Gordon Sinclair, Hirsch, Snugs, Fareware, Promo Hunt, NC Custom. Tony over at Promo Hunt did all the t-shirts and sold those through his website. So a lot of companies rallied around this and got involved.
There's a couple of ways we can support the next initiative, this initiative that's happening still now. One of the ways you talked about is, is the search looking for merchandise that is— can you explain that a little bit?
Sure. Yeah. So in both the ESP search product and the Sage search product now, there are filters where you can filter by companies that, you know, they, they offer environmentally conscious products, you know, sustainable products. Responsible sourcing, companies that have DEI initiatives, all those kinds of things. Now you can look for suppliers that are actually involved in those kinds of initiatives. And then of course, you can always go to Promocares.org. We have a directory on there that kind of highlights all the suppliers in the industry that are doing these kinds of things. Yeah. And this particular campaign, you can still go to Promocares.org and there's a tab for all our— we call them our For Good events. So you'll see all of our last 3 For Good events. There's still a link there where you can go order one of these, these t-shirts. It says water is a human right on the front, and that money will go toward this campaign. And, you know, we haven't figured out what next year's campaign is. We didn't expect this one to last all year and, and grow so much money and involve the building of so many towers. So give us a little bit to figure out what next year's campaign is going to be.
Well, we'll link all this in the show notes. Again, that's promocares.org. There's also planetwater.org. planet-water.org is their organization. But we'll add all this in the show notes. I just want to say on behalf of the community, thanks to the many suppliers and Promocare's board and everyone that supported this initiative. What an amazing, encouraging initiative, and we look forward to more.
Thanks, Bobby.
Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.
