Charlene Ren: MIT Alumni Tackling Food and Water Challenges After Graduation

Despite still being in trial phasing, MyH2O has been able to send over one hundred teams, made up of over eight hundred volunteers, into the field to do water testing and community outreach and education. Credit: Charlene Ren

MyH2O’s data platform is not just about finding solutions to rural community’s water challenges, it’s also about elevating the voices within those communities. Credit: Charlene Ren

MyH2O has enabled communities to advocate for themselves, to speak out and bring attention to the problems they are facing and collaborate to find solutions. Credit: Charlene Ren

Despite still being in trial phasing, MyH2O has been able to send over one hundred teams, made up of over eight hundred volunteers, into the field to do water testing and community outreach and education. Credit: Charlene Ren

MyH2O’s data platform is not just about finding solutions to rural community’s water challenges, it’s also about elevating the voices within those communities. Credit: Charlene Ren

MyH2O has enabled communities to advocate for themselves, to speak out and bring attention to the problems they are facing and collaborate to find solutions. Credit: Charlene Ren

By the end of her first semester of graduate school in 2014, Charlene Ren had already developed and written the business proposal for her company MyH2O, a grassroots-based information platform that uses cloud-sourced networks to collect rural water quality and sanitation data to help develop and deliver collaborative solutions for village communities in China. By the time she graduated from MIT with a dual master’s degree in environmental engineering and technology and policy, she was well situated to launch her business and follow her passion to improve water quality and public engagement in rural areas of China, which she has pursued ever since.

Although her interests had always been rooted in sustainability and environmental justice, her time at MIT helped her to put her plans into action. In a course offered by MIT D-Lab on international development, Charlene was prompted to first write her business proposal for MyH2O. From there she developed her business concept further with the help of her advisor, J-WAFS director John H. Lienhard V, and submitted it to the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge. Her ideas for MyH2O were also inspired a J-WAFS-supported project she worked on looking to improve water quality testing capabilities and methodologies in India.

Through this work, alongside J-WAFS PI’s Rohit Karnik (Department of Mechanical Engineering), Chintan Vaishnav (Sloan School of Management), and John Hart (Department of Mechanical Engineering), Charlene was inspired to think further about how the kind of data collected in rural India could be similarly effective in guiding solution delivery in rural communities across China. Through this J-WAFS supported work she was able gain essential “insights, knowledge and experience to start building a water and sanitation data related NGO.” Her time studying water quality in India, “propelled [her] to push MyH2O further and really make it happen on the ground in China.” Right now, MyH2O’s platform is only offered in China, “but one day we are hoping to expand into India,” Charlene said.

That someday may be sooner than we think. After graduating with her master’s from MIT and winning a fellowship from the nonprofit Echoing Green, Charlene moved back to China to lead MyH2O which has since become increasingly successful. “We didn’t aim for such a fast route,” Charlene said. Her team started out working on small individual cases trying to understand the best way to deliver solutions to the small communities they were working with. Only after these initial case-by-case studies was MyH2O able to start scale efforts. Despite still being in trial phasing, MyH2O has been able to send over one hundred teams, made up of over eight hundred volunteers, into the field to do water testing and community outreach and education. In total those teams have been able to complete over ten thousand datasets across eight hundred different villages throughout rural parts of China. In addition to making huge strides in data collection, MyH2O has also been able to actualize solutions in many of these villages. Charlene said that, “over time [MyH2O] moved to solving individual cases on the ground” connecting villages to real-world water solutions through partnering with organizations that want to deliver their technologies to these towns.

MyH2O’s data platform is not just about finding solutions to rural community’s water challenges, it’s also about elevating the voices within those communities. “We are empowering individuals so that they can be the agents of their own communities,” Charlene says. What MyH2O has enabled is for communities to advocate for themselves, to speak out and bring attention to the problems they are facing and collaborate to find solutions. “But these are not just voices of pain,” Charlene stresses,” “these are voices of hope and power. Before, they were hidden and silent. Now, they are out there, they are louder, they are more powerful, and they are stronger than ever before.”

Charlene’s work to empower individuals and improve access to clean water for over 300 million rural Chinese has not gone unnoticed. In 2019, she was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list of social entrepreneurs who are using business acumen to make a lasting impact on the world.

Want to find out more about MIT alumni working in food and water? Click here.