Many companies that take community impact seriously eventually build a foundation. Creating a separate legal entity with its own governance, budget, and identity is the most common setup for corporate giving. Xylem chose a different path.
Xylem Watermark, the company’s global corporate citizenship program, is not a foundation. It sits inside the business rather than beside it, and Xylem invests a portion of company profits into water causes every year. By keeping Watermark part of how the company runs, Xylem keeps its social mission closely connected to the business. The two pull in the same direction: water.
That distinction sits at the heart of this conversation. In a series exploring how leading organizations build a legacy that reaches beyond financial performance, Xylem offers something unusual: a mature, globally recognized program in which the company’s expertise, its people and its philanthropy are aligned around a mission connected to the business it is in.
To understand what that looks like in practice, what it takes to sustain it, and how to build a legacy beyond the profits, Margaret Jaouadi spoke with Claudia Toussaint, EVP and Chief People and Sustainability Officer at Xylem.
Shared purpose that brought two companies together
Margaret: Take us back to the moment you realized Watermark had become more than a program of work.
Claudia: Two moments really stand out for me. The first was in 2019, when we set out our 2025 sustainability agenda. At the time, the whole agenda, including our Watermark goals, seemed completely out of reach. We committed to reaching 20 million people with clean water and sanitation, supporting 200 disaster-affected areas and engaging our employees at a scale we had never attempted before.
The second came when we acquired Evoqua in 2023, which really accelerated our progress. We were bringing two companies and two different workforces together. Watermark could have been a huge distraction; instead, it became an important part of the shared identity that helped bring the two organizations together.
When you bring two organizations together, you usually have a ton of cultural issues. Instead, colleagues from both legacy companies volunteered side by side. The Evoqua team saw how our sustainability goals could help integrate the two companies, and it gave them a real sense of purpose.
We were also doing a lot of other culture work at the same time, including rolling out our high-impact culture. But if you had asked me in 2019 whether those goals would become a catalyst for bringing two companies together, I could not have told you that was the plan. It ended up being a huge advantage, and that was the moment I thought, wow, this is really different.
Margaret: Plenty of companies reach for a foundation as a natural home for this kind of work. Xylem chose not to. What does keeping Watermark inside the business make possible?
Claudia: We have had lots of conversations about whether to form a foundation. A foundation is a separate entity with its own governance, budget and identity. Instead, we chose to say that Watermark is who we are as an enterprise. We can take that approach because our commercial work and our Watermark work are closely tied, so our community work stays closely tied to the business.
We fund Watermark through a percentage of a mix of our prior-year and projected profits. In 2025, that came to $9.1 million, which we disclose in our sustainability report. Because the investment comes from our operating budget, we review it and hold it to the same standards as the rest of the business.
It also means our initiatives align with our employee engagement and business strategies, and we have much more agility. There is very little distance between our social mission and our business, and that is by design. Our expertise is water, our people are water people, and our giving is water giving. It’s all connected.
Margaret: How does that show up when you are attracting talent?
Claudia: It gives us a huge talent advantage. When candidates see a foundation, they think, fine, the company is committed to community impact. When they see that, at Xylem, purpose is embedded in how we operate rather than handed off to a separate entity, it signals that this really matters to us. It is authentic to who we are.
I recently sat down with a fairly senior executive during her orientation and asked her what brought her to us. She told me about a water tower Watermark had built in the community in Southeast Asia where she is from. She had experienced it personally, and a few years later it drew her to us. You could argue that is an anecdote, but it is what I hear over and over again.
Margaret: Being part of the business also seems to let Xylem move quickly when disaster strikes. Is that by design?
Claudia: It is. When we committed in 2019 to supporting 200 disaster-affected areas, we also set out internally to build the expertise to deploy quickly there, because our solutions make a difference. We have used our social impact to build on our expertise and make it even better. That is the win-win of having it integrated into the business.
Why expertise matters as much as money
Margaret: Xylem’s expertise is water, and Watermark puts that expertise to work alongside the funding. What does the combination make possible that money alone would not?
Claudia: Let me start with what money can do. Money can fund a water system installation. Expertise keeps it running five years later and enables the community to take ownership and maintain it.
Our work with UNICEF on a regional WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) program in East Africa is a good example. It delivered climate-resilient water and sanitation to over half a million refugees and displaced people. The philanthropic funding paid for solar technology tied to water services. Our groundwater expertise and commercial utility experience helped build local capacity.
That combination shifts communities away from ad hoc, short-term relief toward lasting, climate-smart water systems and resilient infrastructure. As I always say, the more commercial success we have, the more we can contribute to this impact, with both our expertise and our funding.
Employees are the program
Margaret: You see the people side of Watermark up close. What role do employees play, and how does their participation shape culture and belonging at Xylem?
Claudia: People sometimes describe employees as participants in Watermark, but at the core, our employees are the program. They make it happen.
Watermark connects our people with the communities we serve, and we use it to build water expertise and leadership skills. Those are real talent outcomes, and they show up in how people feel. In our last employee survey, 73% were favorable and deeply engaged, 77% would recommend Xylem as a place to work, and 84% were clear on how their work contributes to our goals.
Peel back one more layer and 81% of our employees volunteer. That is a real differentiator. Yes, we have a policy that gives every employee 20 paid hours of volunteer time off. But you cannot mandate 81% participation through a policy. We have a global network of more than 500 Watermark champions who drive it. They are the heart and soul of the program.
It builds belonging, too. When people work together on a project, whether it is cleaning up a park or building a water tower, the org charts disappear. The CEO can volunteer next to a service technician, both contributing to the same cause. You can’t manufacture that in a policy.
And we recognize people. You cannot qualify for certain development programs without taking part in and championing our social impact work. Through our Make Your Mark Club, our CEO recognized nearly 4,000 employees who have volunteered 20 or more hours.
At our recent Global Leaders Summit, we brought together 150 of our top leaders and held a Watermark event. Whenever the senior leadership team meets in a location, we join the employees there for a Watermark event. Those joint activities build culture. It is not about a policy or writing a check. It is about actually showing up and doing it together.
Employee participation is at 81%, but it wasn’t at that level at the start. As leaders, we set the tone and create the ground for enthusiasm to grow. Our employees are the heart of it, but leadership has modeled it and, over the years, worked to embed it throughout. What we do commercially and what we do for communities is all connected, and water is the common thread.
Partnerships that go further
Margaret: Can you share a story that shows Watermark at its best, perhaps one where a partnership helped you reach further than Xylem could alone?
Claudia: Our longest-standing partnership is with Planet Water Foundation. In 2025, we provided humanitarian assistance in 46 disaster-affected areas across more than 20 countries. We deployed water filtration systems, sometimes as compact blocks and sometimes as larger towers, to schools, community hubs, and evacuation centers in places as diverse as Jamaica, the Philippines, and Mexico.
We partner where we cannot go alone. Planet Water Foundation knows how to move fast in a crisis and has a local presence on the ground, which is a key differentiator. We bring the funding and our water treatment expertise. Neither can do it alone. The partnership brings funding, expertise and local presence together.
Commercial success and community impact
Margaret: When community impact and commercial success support one another, the results are more durable. How have you seen that play out at Xylem?
Claudia: We don’t view them as two different programs. They are the same work our people do, seen from two angles.
On the commercial side, our water technologies have enabled the reuse of more than 22 billion cubic meters of water and prevented more than 13 billion cubic meters of polluted water from entering ecosystems. By 2030, we aim to help our customers cut water demand by 2 billion cubic meters every year.
Sometimes people ask, what on earth is a billion cubic meters? It is about 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Or, roughly, the water a city of 10 to 15 million people uses in a year, depending on where you are in the world. That’s a really meaningful number.
On the community side, since 2019 we have reached 20 million people with clean water and sanitation, and we have supported the 200 disaster-affected areas we set out to reach through our people and partners. The program’s durability comes from the fact that both sides are connected.
We repeated this at our Global Leaders Summit: the more financially successful we are, the more impact we can have. When we brought Xylem and Evoqua together, we created our high-impact culture, and we chose the word “impact” on purpose. It covers the financial impact you can have, the impact with your customers and the impact in your communities.
Trust built over years
Margaret: Trust is earned slowly. What have you learned about building it with employees, customers and communities by staying committed over many years?
Claudia: It looks different for each group. For talent in the marketplace, when candidates experience Watermark as part of how we run the company rather than a side program, it makes our employer brand incredibly powerful. We don’t just talk about it. We live it, make it visible and let people experience it.
With our employees, we are very open about what we fund, and we make sure everyone knows they have 20 hours of paid volunteer time off. They can use it with water-related organizations or with organizations in their own community.
With customers, trust comes because our expertise is so closely connected to our mission. Many of our customers are municipalities, and municipalities are deeply embedded in their communities. A partner that brings technical, product, and service expertise alongside social impact and community expertise is a real differentiator.
Communities learn to trust us because we’re there not only when something bad happens. We are there afterwards too, either directly or through one of our partners.
The legacy: building capacity
Margaret: Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for business to do more on the world’s water challenges, and what would you like Watermark’s lasting legacy to be?
Claudia: The biggest opportunity is to close the funding gap by bringing in private capital and private expertise. The investment needed in water infrastructure is large today, and the gap is projected to grow by several hundred billion dollars. Challenges like that cannot be solved with philanthropy alone, which is why I think the Watermark model is so powerful.
We help in a few ways. Some of our Watermark partnerships, such as our work with UNICEF, use catalytic funding. We also recently issued the first corporate blue bond in the United States, a dedicated instrument that directs capital to water infrastructure, ocean health and coastal resilience. It is in our fabric.
Skills-based volunteering is where our private expertise comes in. We share our people’s water expertise through skills, volunteer hours, and capacity-building with community organizations. Partnerships matter, as our work with UNICEF and the Planet Water Foundation shows.
As for legacy, one way to measure it is the 20 million people we have served through Watermark, and we are really proud of that. But when I think about what the legacy should be, I think about building capacity in the broadest sense. Local utilities that can run their own water systems. Communities that can maintain what we helped build. And employees who carry the instinct to serve, which they may have discovered at Xylem, wherever their careers take them, so that they can build that capacity in other organizations, too.
Lastly, I want Watermark to help companies understand that they don’t have to choose between commercial success and being a force for good. Commercial work and community work are not in contradiction.
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