5% Project With Josie Prendergast

Late last year we visited the Philippines for our 21st PARGO Clean Water Project. The Philippines holds a special part in our heart, it's pure tropical paradise with amazing waves great culture and incredibly happy and beautiful locals. 

Although it's also a place where clean water doesn't come easy and often the bottled filtered option is far too expensive for the majority of the locals leaving them to drink dirty water. Leading to illness and diarrhea from bacteria, Typhoid, e-coli and lots of other water borne diseases.


That's where we come in, being able to travel to these amazing places and actually make a difference is why we started Project PARGO.

We are always going to continue to travel to these parts of the world on our own adventures, chasing waves and good times.

Now we have the opportunity to actually help with one of the most vital elements of survival and a healthy life - clean water.

In this project, we had PARGO team rider Josie Prendergast join and help demonstrate, teach and implement the incredible Sawyer gravity-fed filtration devices in 4 remote communities, on some of the smaller islands close to where she was born in the Philippines.


Having Josie part of the PARGO family has been a natural evolution from her first purchasing her own PARGO water bottle from McTavish Surfboards one of our stockists in Byron Bay, to meeting in the Philippines a few years back when she joined for a day, helping out in a community on Siargao.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Josie has joined the PARGO family full-time, spreading the good word and now getting to be part of the full scope of a clean water project.


This was a special project as we were helping communities close to where Josie is from.

These small island communities were hit hard in Typhoon Odeette and, unfortunately, didn’t receive as much help and support as some of the main areas of General Luna.

We started the project meeting with Jon and Diane from the Waves for Water Philippines team and prepped the bucket filters and hand washing stations we were going to donate over the following days.

We woke up early and traveled by boat to visit these communities with no road access.

The communities are basically cut off from easy to access supplies meaning almost everything, including the price of filtered water is more expensive and mostly not affordable.

Leaving them to drink the dirty water running from the mountains and using a t-shirt to try and filter the sediment and bacteria. This often leading to diarrhea and other illnesses.

We visited 4 villages - Brgy. San Carlos, Brgy. Santa Filomena, Brgy. Corregidor and Brgy. Bagakay over 2 full days.

Implementing 160 filters and helping 539 families (2602 people) gain much needed access to clean drinking water for the very first time!

The filters are shared between multiple households and can filter 4.5 million litres of water, lasting for 15 years when maintained correctly.


Josie Speaks in Siagaoan and it was amazing to have her connect with these people, the trust and happiness that she brought to this project was priceless, a special mention to Gigi Forcidilla who also joined to help communicate and help the locals learn how to use and maintain the filters.



Each village was so thankful and genuinely so happy to receive these life changing devices. They all gave us an epic lunch and treated us so well. 

We got to hang with the kids and get shown around the villages, learning how they are living and also how hard it is especially in the monsoon season when the water runs brown. We also donated Hand Washing stations for all the schools and kindergartens in the villages - Teaching about hygiene and the importance of cleaning hands after the bathroom and before eating to help prevent more illness.

After a couple days we ended up heading back to the mainland (still a tiny island) and headed for some quality time in the water surfing and hanging out island style.

An epic time and we are so grateful to be able to do this.


We hope you like the clip Josie's connection to her community is one of the purest things we have been part of, we are so proud to have her in the PARGO family. 

We can't wait to help more people gain access to clean water in the Philippines. 

Thanks to everyone who has purchased a PARGO it's because of YOU we get to help these amazing people!

SHOP INSULATED BOTTLES
SHOP INSULATED CUPS
SHOP INSULATED STUBBY HOLDERS
5% PROJECT WITH LILLIANA BOWREY