Our Story

“My motivation started when I was about eleven years old, and it came from me learning about the environment from my teachers at school. It got to the point when I really wanted to make an active change and I wanted to do something that could make a difference in the world. As I started to evolve these ideas, I started to realize that we have problems so close to home.”

- Jaden Smith

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Jaden Smith and Drew FitzGerald founded JUST Water, which demonstrated a more sustainable approach to bottled water. In 2016, after donating water to Flint with JUST Water, Drew and Jaden decided to engineer a solution that would provide water without all the plastic. What began as an experiment to come up with an alternative to single-use plastic water bottles in Flint became 501CTHREE, a new type of nonprofit for a younger generation focused on Energy, Food, Water, and Shelter. 501CTHREE brought together a team of passionate and experienced innovators to address the problems that climate change and resource scarcity have on communities of color. 

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The programs that began at 501CTHREE continue at waterbox.org and The Water Genome