Co-founder of Who Gives a Crap, Jehan Ratnatunga joined Soccerscene’s Off the Pitch Podcast to discuss how his organisation has begun investing in sport after last year’s partnership with English football team, Lewes FC.
Who Gives a Crap is a profit for purpose business renowned for its range of household products, especially its toilet paper. From its sales, Who Gives a Crap donates 50% of all profits to funding improved sanitation and toilet access to those in disadvantaged and developing areas.
Founded in 2012, Who Gives a Crap was launched in Melbourne but has since expanded globally into the US, Canada, Europe and the UK. Recently, the organisation dived deeper into the UK through a partnership with Lewes FC.
Lewes FC is from East Sussex, in the southeast of England and is famous for being a high profile socially conscious team, becoming the first team in the world to pay equal wages to both its male and female teams. A decision which Ratnatunga says influenced Who Gives a Crap’s move to partner with the club.
“Lewes FC is very much community involved, they have a big focus on equality and gender equality as part of their ethos,” he said on the podcast.
“They have equal pay for their men’s team and the women’s team and that’s very much related to the sanitation work we do. Sanitation and giving people access to a toilet actually is really also about equal opportunity between genders. Especially in schools where young girls will drop out of school if there’s no toilet in that school at a much higher rate than young boys, and that leads to huge disparity in the long run.
“And so there’s a really big connection between the work they’re doing on the field and in the game, to the work we’re doing in sanitation. And so that’s how it made sense from a partnership point of view.”
To learn more about Who Gives a Crap’s partnership with Lewes FC, listen to the full interview with Jehan Ratnatunga on episode five of Soccerscene’s Off the Pitch Podcast – available on all major podcasting apps.
