George McGraw

George McGraw did not come to water the way most water-tech founders do. His background is in international human rights law, with a master's from the UN-mandated University for Peace, and his graduate thesis argued for the "minimum core" of the human right to water, the legal floor every person is owed. So when he started DigDeep out of his bedroom a little over a decade ago, he did what almost everyone in that world did and pointed it abroad, building water-access systems in South Sudan and Cameroon.

George McGraw then got the phone call that redirected his whole career, the one he told in full on (don't) Waste Water. A donor named Karen in California offered him fifty dollars on one condition, that he spend it not overseas but in the United States, on the Navajo Nation. He pushed back, telling her nobody needed that money here, and she set him straight. She had been building homes on the largest Native American reservation in the country and her Navajo colleagues had told her they would not bother adding bathrooms, because there was no running water and none was coming. McGraw drove out to see it, and the Navajo Water Project, DigDeep's first US program, was born.

George McGraw built DigDeep into the only organization focused entirely on what he calls the Water Gap: the roughly 2.2 million Americans who have no tap or toilet at home, spread across all 50 states and often a ten-minute drive from people who have no idea the problem exists. The pattern underneath it is uncomfortable, and McGraw is blunt about it: race is the single strongest predictor of whether your family has running water in America, with Native households about nineteen times more likely than white households to go without. DigDeep's field teams now connect homes to water, on-grid or off, through the Navajo, Appalachia, and Colonias Water Projects, while a research and policy arm keeps measuring the gap so governments can no longer say it isn't there.

George McGraw's other big move was to make the dry economic case that water people had been missing. In 2019 he co-authored "Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States," the first national study to count the 2.2 million, with Radhika Fox, who went on to run the water office at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Then in 2022 DigDeep published "Draining," which put hard numbers on the cost of doing nothing. The figure that lands hardest is the return: for every single dollar invested in getting taps and toilets to these families, the study found the US economy gets back about five dollars, because closing the gap means fewer waterborne illnesses, fewer lost school and work hours, and lower healthcare bills. Leave it open, and the same math runs the other way, draining roughly $8.6 billion a year out of the economy.

George McGraw frames the whole thing as a "wrong pocket problem," the economist's name for what happens when the people who would have to pay to fix something are not the ones who reap the benefit, which is most of why this gap has stayed open for decades. He is, even so, stubbornly optimistic that it can be closed within a generation, and a lot of his recent energy has gone into the unglamorous plumbing of that, including a certificate program with the plumbers' union and the plumbing-standards body IAPMO at Navajo Technical University, training the first cohort of Navajo plumbers so the money and the skills stay in the community. In May 2026, after roughly fifteen years, McGraw handed off the CEO role and stayed on as DigDeep's founder and senior advisor.

“I started DigDeep in my bedroom a little over a decade ago, and our focus was on South Sudan and Cameroon. And then one day I got a call from a donor, a woman named Karen in California, who said, "I want to donate $50, but I want you to spend it in the US on the Navajo Nation."”

He is, in short, the rare advocate who can hold the moral argument and the spreadsheet in the same breath, which is most of why the US Water Gap went from a problem almost nobody had heard of to one a federal water office, a plumbers' union, and a growing coalition are now actively trying to close.