Join Blog Action Day

“You ain’t gonna miss your water ’til your well runs dry.” – Bob Marley

Almost a billion people on the planet live without access to safe drinking water. Maybe you run a nonprofit that focuses on international access to water, maybe you're a cause-based blogger, maybe you have heard of organizations like charity:water and water.org but haven't known what you could do to pitch in and help their cause. Now is your chance to get involved!

Thousands of bloggers are joining together this Friday, October 15th, for Blog Action Day in a unified front to discuss the impact of water. Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. By creating a tidal wave on one unified day, sponsor change.org hopes to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion around an important issue that impacts everyone worldwide.

Why should you get involved? Besides of course that it's an important global topic, this is a great opportunity to network with other bloggers, nonprofits and activists. Many nonprofits tell us here at WhatGives that you're looking to join the conversation but don't have a lot of time. Or that you are looking for others in your space but had limited time and resources to find who the big players are in your space.

Blog Action Day is one of those easy, low-hanging-fruit opportunities to get out there, and blog about water issues. Since access to clean drinking water affects all of us, I encourage you to find a way to make it fit your mission and join this initiative. Much of the cause-based conversation online on Friday will circle around water, and what better opportunity to add your voice to the mix.

Past years have driven ideas, advice, plans, and action to important causes. 2007's theme was the environment, 2008 was poverty, and last year the conversation was around climate change.

According to Blog Action Day, less than 1% of all fresh water is readily accessible for direct human use, representing only 0.007% of all water on earth. As the final push of encouragement to join this movement, here are five things about water you may not have known:

• Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.
• More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet.
• Every day, women and children in Africa walk a combined total of 109 million hours to get water.
• It takes 6.3 gallons of water to produce just one hamburger.
• The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world.

More more information, Water.org just put together a resource guide for Blog Action Day 2010 bloggers providing a base for information and education around water access in the developing world.

Ready to take action? Register your blog, sign the petition, start a fundraising campaign and/or grab an action widget, and get ready for an amazing day of blog activism.

This blog post was originally published on WhatGives!?