Alumnus leads nonprofit to ensure clean water access for communities in Latin America

Daniel Rodriguez BBA '11 is using his FIU business degree to serve those who lack the most basic necessity: clean water. 

Rodriguez has what he calls a common ‘Miami story.’ His parents came to Miami from Cuba in 1959, and his family eventually settled in Kendall. His entrepreneurial spirit bloomed at FIU where his passion project grew into a fulfilling career delivering access to clean water for communities in Latin America.

He took the risk of creating a charity instead of taking a corporate job, and it’s a decision he’d never change. It gave him a chance to innovate.

In 2010, as an undergraduate student at FIU Business, he co-founded BLUE Missions with his sister. Its goal is to bring clean water to parts of Latin America through youth-led service trips. Today, they’ve completed 275 community development projects, providing almost 50,000 people with clean water, sanitation and filtration with the help of over 5,700 volunteers.

His inspiration came from a mission trip to the Dominican Republic that he participated in during high school. After working for several days to bring water to the area, he witnessed a child dancing under a pipe of running clean water. There, it dawned on him.

“Leodi [the child] didn’t really understand the magnitude of the project. But when I looked around, the elders were crying tears of joy, knowing that their grandchildren wouldn’t have to walk for water the same way they did,” said Rodriguez. “I was hooked.”

Now he manages a team of 14 employees in Miami and 45 team members in the Dominican Republic who run logistics, training and engineering. Rodriguez was even able to convince his dad to leave a corporate job and join his international programs division.

“We knew that we wanted to do things differently as a nonprofit,” said Rodriguez. “We knew that we wanted to focus on storytelling, on branding, on marketing. We wanted to be fully transparent to our donors and show them exactly where their dollars were going.”

BLUE Missions began to implement the “Be Bold” model and opened two bank accounts, one for donations and one for operations.

"One hundred percent of public donations go directly to the field, so these are innovations,” said Rodriguez. “These are things that make our jobs harder to do, but we did it because we knew the negative connotation that existed around nonprofits, and we knew that we wanted to be different, and we wanted to innovate in this space.”

As BLUE Missions grew, the leadership team adapted their business plan and launched sanitation, filtration and sustainability programming to ensure not only that there is water for all, but also water forever. They even secured a partnership with Tripadvisor Charitable Foundation, which gave them $400,000 for four years to fund materials while they grew their program. The partnership ran from 2015-2018.

Rodriguez hopes other business students consider nonprofits as a structural model.

"My best advice would be, ‘have a strong why,’” said Rodriguez. “Make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons at your core, and then don’t be afraid to innovate and to challenge the status quo in the sector because it’s one of these sectors that doesn’t take much to stand out.”