He Built His First Well at Age 7 — Then Gave Up Fame to Run the Foundation as an Adult
In the spring of 2013, a young man named Ryan Hreljac graduated from King’s University College at Western University in London, Ontario, with a Bachelor’s degree and a double major in International Development and Political Science.He could have done almost anything.He had been internationally famous since the age of seven. He had delivered a TED talk, appeared on Oprah, and spoken before the United Nations General Assembly. He had grown up in front of cameras, on stages, in church basements, and high school auditoriums, repeatedly telling the same powerful story — a story that had begun when he was just six years old.
That story started in Grade One when his teacher, Nancy Prest, told the class that children half a world away were walking five kilometers each day to collect drinking water that might kill them. Ryan counted the steps from his classroom to the school water fountain — just ten steps. He went home that afternoon and told his mother he needed seventy dollars to build a well in Africa.What followed is now well-known. His parents made him earn the money through household chores. When he learned a well actually cost closer to two thousand dollars, he kept working. In 1999, at the age of seven, the first well he funded was opened at Angolo Primary School in northern Uganda.By age twelve, he had raised over a million dollars.
By twenty, he had appeared on nearly every major North American media outlet and spoken in front of audiences that included a former U.S. president and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. He became the living example of what a child could accomplish.After finishing high school, he chose to study International Development and Political Science at King’s University College. He graduated in 2013 at the age of twenty-two.Instead of pursuing other paths, Ryan decided to go to work for the very foundation he had started as a child — Ryan’s Well Foundation.His parents, particularly his mother Susan, had been running the organization since its formal incorporation as a registered Canadian charity in 2001.
Ryan stepped into a senior role, serving at various times as Executive Director, ambassador, primary spokesperson, and board member.The foundation has grown into a professional international development organization with paid staff, strong partnerships across Africa, and a focus on sustainable work. Ryan has spent years mastering the technical, financial, and operational realities of clean water projects — the unglamorous but essential work of ensuring wells drilled years ago are still functioning today.Today, Ryan’s Well Foundation has completed more than 1,800 water projects across seventeen countries, providing clean water to over 1.6 million people.
The numbers continue to grow.What makes Ryan’s journey remarkable is not just that he started the foundation as a six-year-old boy. It’s that after achieving international fame and earning a university degree, he chose to return and dedicate his professional life to running it.He is now thirty-five years old. The first well he helped build twenty-seven years ago is still serving a community whose children have now grown up and have children of their own.The boy who wanted to build one well never walked away from the mission.
