Sasha Kramer
"We started very small — really, one toilet at a time.”
Quarantining in response to the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to make decisions from the comfort of home, on questions like what to wear for Zoom meetings and how long their kids could play on the computer. But Sasha Kramer ’94, says 2020 has only reinforced that for millions, home doesn’t necessarily equal comfort.
“I’ve always felt that having a private place to go to the bathroom is a human right,” Kramer says. She is executive director of SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods), which provides restorative ecological sanitation solutions to the residents of Haiti, where she lives with her husband and five-year-old son. “COVID has made that all the more clear to me. Imagine you’re being told to stay home and you don’t have a toilet. Your only option for going to the bathroom is to use a shared facility, where you know your exposure risk is very high.”
Kramer first went to Haiti in 2004, while earning a doctorate in ecology from Stanford. She spent two years there as a human rights observer and discovered that the impact of poverty was often made most visible by people’s lack of access to clean toilets and proper sanitation. As she witnessed untreated human waste go into the water and sicken Haitians, Kramer cast about for a real-world, ecologically-based solution. In 2006, she cofounded SOIL with Sarah Brownell (now a senior lecturer at Rochester Institute of Technology). The nonprofit organization’s mission was straightforward: provide people better access to working toilets and transform the collected human waste into agricultural-grade compost.
“SOIL was founded with this idea of how do you take a serious public health problem and transform it not only into not being a problem anymore, but being a real solution for a lot of these other environmental issues that we see,” Kramer says. “We started very small — really, one toilet at a time.”
