Gemma has traveled around the world and mobilized over 100 cities in over 60 countries to join this global peace movement, The Million Voice Choir. Her organization, a Single Drop (ASD) mobilizes the Million Voice Choir to promote social action specifically around water issues and encourage environmental stewardship to cultivate peace. The Million Voice Choir’s purpose bridges cultures worldwide, creating a worldwide experience for people to see and feel the magnitude of a simple action as it's effects ripple outward. A Single Drop is WEA's partner in the African Women and Water Conference.

Below is an interview by Rachael Sydney Knight: 

What problem are you confronting in your work?

The actual global issue that A Single Drop is trying to address is the global water crisis – 1.2 billion people in the world don’t have access to fresh water – access being one km from the source, 20 liters per person per day (about 5 gallons per person per day).  A Single Drop’s goal is to create community-based water organizations that are local and citizen run. We are implementing and introducing appropriate, sustainable water technologies into communities, making sure that these technologies are useful for the community and they can implement them on their own. The appropriate technology must meet certain criteria: all the materials must be locally available and affordable, local people must be able to build it themselves, they must be easy to maintain and must require very little maintenance.

We also work with organizations to help them develop a solid infrastructure that can then be used as an entree into the community to start teaching water, sanitation and hygiene, or WASH. It’s a full project – it’s about changing the practices, not just going in and giving away the technologies.  Behavior change at all levels from the personal to the community, is crucial for significant change. We use theatre and other kinds of tools – pictures, games, resource mapping – as a means through which they can figure out the source of their issues. We are training people to be water advocates. We also support the organization that we help form or work with by helping them to offer a viable water service that can be turned into a livelihood; we teach them to sell the technology for a profit. So to ensure sustainability, we help them create a business plan – it is crucial that they are self-reliant and therefore they need to have business and organizational skills. We also teach the organization cooperative infrastructure – shared power, all done by committee.  It’s not easy, but the flow of the training helps them to see the benefits of working as a team as opposed to working for someone else.

The first thing that needs to happen is for the people to start taking action together.  Our slogan, “It takes A Single Drop of water to start a wave” – we are giving people a little nudge, telling them, “You have this information now, what can you do with it to make an impact on your family and the whole community?”  It’s essential to make sure they are the ones teaching, as they are the ones who have the knowledge and local sensitivity that we don’t have. So we are helping to develop their materials and asking, “What can we do to make sure the messages are adapted to the community?”

What has been your personal process of coming to this work?

As for how I got involved in this work, it wasn’t so much that I was looking for a cause – I just sort of stumbled upon it. It evolved from a song into this global water project. Seven years ago I was having a music career, and then I came to a point in my life where things just didn’t work – they didn’t feel good anymore. That happened right before 9/11 and I was living in New York City. I had just come back from India, where the issues of poverty, inequity, water etc. were inescapable. I was already prepared for a change and 9/11 was the incident that crossed me over. I didn’t know how to be in the world the way I was anymore, the way it was.  So three months later I found myself back in India. His holiness the Dali Lama was doing a teaching in Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Half a million people were there to pray for world peace. I don’t ever remember in my life such an incredible feeling of being connected to others. That was when I wrote the song “WE RISE”. It was something that had been in me that wanted to be written. Because that was my way of healing, getting through something. After every tragedy I always find where the inspiration lies and what I need to do to start my own personal healing.

The way I saw it, people who had been so separated became this global community, unified by the tragedy. Experiencing nearly half a million people praying together in one place for one cause was life changing. From that amazing experience at the heels of 9/11, the idea of creating a world peace movement seemed to make sense. The core message of the song is how through every obstacle we can rise together and that our every thought and action has an impact on the world. Like when a drop of water falls into a pool, there are reverberating circles. That became the metaphor we used: “it takes a single drop of water to start a wave.”  Because the song used water as a metaphor, I thought about how water was inherently relentless, inherently peaceful. Water takes the path of least resistance; when water hits an obstacle it finds a better path. When it absorbs toxins, its nature is to purify.  I took that metaphor and talked about how we as water beings can embody those powerful qualities. 

I took “WE RISE” and decided to build The Million Voice Choir to sing it from all over the globe. I moved out of New York and left everything – I had no money and gave away my belongings. I started traveling with just a backpack, guitar, and one song and began inviting people to be part of the choir.  I traveled and invited people to sing this song with me. As I moved from one place to the next, I had moments of utter faith believing that this million voice choir could happen, and moments of utter doubt, saying to myself, “What are you doing? Get a job!”  One day, I was about to toss the song and go back to living a normal life. That was on a Saturday. Then that following Monday, I got a call from a friend, and she said to me “I’m here at the United Nations and they are calling your song the New Human World Anthem!” And she put the phone away from her ear so I could hear my song playing at the UN. I remember that was the exact moment when I crossed over from hope to faith.

Because hope - there is always this little essence of doubt in hope. “I hope it happens but….” But faith is utter surrender. Faith is unwavering. That’s when I got a sense of being completely trusting – that if I am supposed to be doing what I was doing, then I am going to endure everything that I need to endure and enjoy all of the blessings I can enjoy. It was as if I started to speak the language of miracles. 

So, I continued traveling, and I literally had nothing. But people had heard about what I was doing and they would buy me airline tickets and hand me thousands of dollars before I got on planes – it was crazy. I have not received a salary in over seven years and I have traveled to over 35 countries. In all my travels of seven years, I have never been in want of place to sleep or a meal to eat.

The Million Voice Choir now sings “WE RISE” every year on September 21st. The first year we had over 100 cities in over 60 countries singing from all over the planet. It was wild, because I was this jazz singer/songwriter/ preschool teacher from New York, and suddenly I found myself standing alongside people like Jane Goodall, Pete Seeger, and Desmond Tutu singing WE RISE and talking about how water can be a source of peace and unity!

After the first year the Million Voice Choir mobilized in 2003, I won an award from Queen Latifah and Cover Girl honoring women who were changing the world through music. I took that award money to learn technologies that would help people in developing countries have clean water and started safe water projects in the Philippines, my country of heritage. 2004 was the year that we opened A Single Drop. Our mission was to raise awareness of water scarcity and the global water issues – to encourage people to see water as a beautiful teacher/messenger/source of life for us all.  There is a Native American belief that we should treat water like our mother – because water, like our mother, nourishes us.  Water, like our mother, gives us life. Why should we dream of doing anything besides taking care of this beautiful gift?

What have been some of the effects of your work?

Our catchphrase in the Philippines ended up being formed by the work that we were doing – “Uniting Communities Through Water” . We saw communities coming together because of their water cause. Water is such a place of community, at every level: at the level of women gathering around the waterhole washing and gossiping, people meeting at the river doing all their daily things – its a place where people come together, where everyone ends up during the day! So for me the most important effect is that people are coming together and that’s been the point of the whole mission, from the beginning: to bring people together. As for women, we make sure that women have access to these technologies – to work with them to start businesses. The sense of empowerment and voice they are finding is amazing; we are seeing them step forward. If you help the woman, you have the whole family; women are the entry point into having the biggest impact on a community.

What kinds of motivation do you think about when it gets hard? How do you deal with your fears or continue in the face of obstacles?

I don’t talk myself out of it; I allow myself to think, “I want to quit, I’m fried, I am done.”  I let myself be in complete and utter doubt, utter fatalism, and it eventually, it just passes. I let it run its course. I let it pass, like a wave. You just need to let it continue to move on. I let myself want to quit and get completely resentful and angry and it just passes naturally. It’s important not to deny that those emotions exist, because they do.  It takes much more work and energy to resist it. It’s effortless to just let frustration and doubt pass. Just like trying to stop water; it will keep pushing and pushing until you let it pass, so don’t deny it, just let it happen.  Rumi wrote a poem talking about how “this body is a guest house”, welcome all of the emotions in, because they are all serving you in some way.  They are all wonderful teachers.”  The hopelessness just goes. I’ll wake up one morning and turn on the computer and be right back at work with no resistance.

How can WEA better serve you? 

I see a network that is really an exchange, where we all feel a real sense of feeding each other, building each other’s capacity. Any network is only effective if there is an exchange. So for me, the question is: “Where are we serving each other?” Or: “Where do we find that our weaknesses are strengthened because of WEA, and how is WEA strengthened because of A Single Drop?”  It’s like the way I see our work when we go in to do a training: I always learn so much more from a community than I feel that I am giving. There is always opportunity for learning at every level, in every relationship.

General advice you would give to other women environmental activists?

Inclusion. Always work with people. Never exclude. Include everyone, making sure that there is not a sense of “we are right and you are wrong.” Be a good listener and include everyone in the conversation. For me, the only opportunity to learn is through dialogue. Sit with people and give them an opportunity to do what they are doing in a better way. Inclusion and humility.

Plans for the future? Next campaigns?

We plan to open an office in Africa next year, and hopefully in South America the following year. We are focused on our “Women and Water Keepers” project, so our next campaign is to expand the “Women and Water Keepers” program into Africa and South America, and to do more awareness-raising in the United States. We want to make our US office the seed funding source and coordinator for all of them, and become a training center for other organizations to come to and learn how to go out and do these kinds of projects so that they are sustainable and successful.

Your hopes and fears?

My fears: My biggest fear is of getting to a point where I feel so burnt out that I stop caring.
My hope:  That I'll never stop caring.