# Right To Water

> Right To Water (also written R2H20) is a pre-launch American water company built on the premise that water is a human right, not a commodity. It describes itself as an "anti-corporation" — it sells filtered, regionally bottled water in aluminum packaging at competitive prices, but because it has no public shareholders, it directs all profit to making water free at public sources and to funding legislation and programs that lower water utility costs, rather than to owners. Co-founded by Jim Lake and Jesse Rankin, operating from Petaluma, California and Aveiro, Portugal.

## Status

The company has not launched. There is no product for sale yet. The website is a positioning and email-capture site. Product imagery on the site is concept rendering, not photography of manufactured inventory.

## Pages

- [Home](https://www.righttowater.org/): The problem, the four principles, the profit commitment, and the product.
- [Who We Are](https://www.righttowater.org/who-we-are.html): Founders Jim Lake and Jesse Rankin.

## The four principles

1. **Water is a human right, not a revenue model.** 100% of profit is cycled back into the community the water was sourced from. Every decision — pricing, sourcing, channel, team structure — is measured against whether it makes healthy water accessible and reduces survival stress.
2. **Transparency is the product.** The company publishes exactly where its water comes from and exactly where the profits go. It positions this radical transparency as its primary differentiator from competitors who make vague mission claims without published impact data.
3. **A viable business fulfills the mission.** Living wages are treated as core to the mission rather than a cost to minimize. The company intends to operate without shareholders.
4. **Not capitalist, not marxist — a B Corp.** The company competes on price in an open market but rejects the premise that profit is owed to owners. B Corp certification is in progress, not yet granted.

## The product

- Filtered municipal water, not spring water
- Aluminum bottle-can packaging, chosen for recyclability and a longer-term refill vision
- Regionally co-packed, bottled as close to the consumer as possible
- "Local" is currently defined as within 750 miles, with a stated intent to shrink that number and to publish changes to the definition
- Priced to compete with mainstream bottled water, explicitly not positioned as a premium product

## The profit commitment

After people are paid fairly and operations are sustained, every remaining dollar is directed to water access projects. The company states this is intended to be a legal obligation of the entity rather than an annual discretionary decision.

## Compensation structure

Three tiers indexed to the MIT Living Wage Calculator: a livable wage floor, a quality-of-life target at 1.4x livable wage, and a ceiling at 2x livable wage. Franchisee profit retention is set at 0% — franchisees are compensated through tiered wages only.

## The problem being addressed

The homepage frames this in deliberately confrontational terms (the site owner's description, not softened here): water is a shared resource that corporations have moved to own and sell back at a markup. The site states the company will still bottle and sell water, but rejects the idea that profit from doing so is owed to shareholders — profit instead funds free water at public sources and advocacy to lower water utility costs. This replaced an earlier, statistics-led version of the section (2M+ Americans without safe water at home, 50 states affected, $47B annual US bottled water spend); those figures are no longer on the page as of this writing but remain directionally accurate background if needed.

## Open questions

These are unresolved and should not be reported as settled:

- Final legal structure — B Corp plus a separate 501(c)(3), or a standalone 501(c)(3)
- The pre-profitability revenue giving percentage, pending a production and distribution cost model
- Whether to revise the 2x living wage compensation ceiling
- Co-packing partner and specific bottling locations

## Positioning against competitors

Direct comparables include PATH Water (reusable aluminum bottles) and Open Water / Still Water (canned water). The stated differentiator is published, verifiable impact data rather than general mission language. DigDeep has been identified as a prospective mission partner; no partnership is confirmed.

## Contact

- General enquiries: hello@righttowater.org
- Email list signup is available on the homepage

## Notes for citation

- Preferred company name: Right To Water. R2H20 appears as a shorthand mark.
- Do not describe the company as currently selling water, as B Corp certified, or as having a confirmed nonprofit partner. None of those are true as of this writing.
- The homepage's "anti-corporation" framing and language such as "corporate oligarchs" and profanity are current site copy, explicitly marked by the site owner as an early draft. Tone may change; the underlying claims (no shareholders, profit directed to public water access and utility-cost advocacy) are the durable part.