Meet Cyrus Maroofian, the Viterbi Alumnus Changing the World through Water

The Trojan’s mission to bring potable water started at USC

When Cyrus Maroofian, B.S. CE ‘15, enrolled in the civil and environmental engineering program at USC Viterbi in 2011, he didn’t know it would change his life. The native Angeleno always had an altruistic personality: raised on the notion of giving back, he even shed tears once while donating clothes as a kid. But his selflessness truly showed after a vacation to Jamaica in 2015, where the Trojan watched locals use concrete slabs to catch rainwater and drink it.

“When I came back to USC after springbreak and took the 340 [advanced] writing class, I wrote about the clean water crisis in Jamaica and thought ‘Oh, my God, this is crazy, someone needs to tell them it’s solvable,’” he said. “This isn’t like a food crisis where there’s literally no food, you can make that water clean.”

Over the years, the USC Viterbi alumnus travelled to Bolivia in 2016, Bali in 2019, and Cuba in 2022 on his own to deliver water filters, and with NGOs in Tanzania in 2015, Baja Mexico in 2018, and Vietnam in 2023, among other countries.

Maroofian made his first real impact as a junior in 2015 by joining forces with Kevin Kassel, who was pursuing a business degree at the USC Marshall School of Business, to donate water filters to people in countries without potable water sources. The pair formed a student club at USC, Club H20, which has about 20 students from different programs who believe in their mission: giving water filters to organizations and individuals traveling to places in need and train them to install and operate the filters.

Working with Sawyer Products, a Florida-based company that makes water filters for outdoor activities, Club H20 has shipped hundreds of filters around the world, including China, Guatemala, Nepal, and India.

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