It’s a bike ride with a purpose.

12-year-old Scotty Parker says, “God’s using me to ride across the country to help other people. Every 21 seconds a child dies from water-borne diseases. I would sit there and I would count off 21 seconds, and I was like, man somebody just died. And I really wanted to help kids like me get clean water.”

When he was eight, Scotty didn’t want presents for his birthday, but donations to Water Mission instead.

He says, “We raised over $618 so after seeing what I could do with that, I started wondering, what else could I do?”

That’s when he planned his first fundraising bike ride at 10-years-old. It went across the state of South Carolina and Scotty raised $70,000 for Water Mission.

He says, “It was enough for two water systems. We put one at a school at Tocoa in Honduras and one at a mountain village in Honduras.”

The Parker family was able to travel to Central America to see the results of that bike ride.

Scotty says, “It was amazing to see how happy those kids were, and they didn’t have that much. That gift of clean water was pretty much all they had now.”

That only inspired Scotty to do more. During his next trip, he is leaving from Santa Monica, California and biking all the way back to Charleston. He is training every day by biking, swimming, and running. The goal is to get the trip done in eight weeks, biking about 75 miles per day. Scotty hopes to raise $500,000 for Water Mission and now has an anonymous donor who will match every donation up to $100,000.

He says, “These kids will have clean water for the rest of their lives, and that’s going to mean so much to them.”

For more information about how to donate, or to join Scotty on a portion of his cross country ride, click here.