Haiti Outreach with Dale Snyder
Posted by Steve Frazier
on Mar 01, 2011
Our program on March 1st was presented by Dale Snyder who is a Rotarian, and one of the founders of Haiti Outreach. His last visit to our club was when he was recruiting people to jump into icy Fish Lake in Maple Grove in mid-January as a fundraiser for one of the Haiti Outreach projects.
Haiti Outreach is a non-profit 501C3 corporation established in 1997 to help foster community-initiated projects to help improve the life of the people of Haiti. Currently the group has 37 employees, mostly in Haiti. This country is the poorest nation in our hemisphere, and in addition to being at the bottom of the scale in all monetary measures, is low on all of the health scales, and has corruption at all levels of government. Add to that the devastation of the earthquake last year which killed an estimated 300,000 Haitians, and you have an idea of the problems that face these people.
"Working Together Building Communities" is the slogan of Haiti Outreach, and the organization enables and funds community initiated projects. The key to their program is that any project they support has to have local community and government "buy-in". For example, they have built schools in Haiti; no school will be built unless the board of education makes a commitment to provide teachers and funding, and the local governments and citizens agree to maintain and care for the buildings. Once those commitments are made, the actual building is started. They have completed 2 secondary schools, and one addition to an existing school.
Haiti Outreach is acting in four areas to reduce poverty and need in Haiti. First, most of their efforts have been in providing clean water to residents (they have funded and drilled 70 wells in central Haiti which provide safe water to over 100,000 residents). Their second focus has been on building secondary public schools, as only 18% of the children have access to education after grade school. The icy dive in Fish Lake in January was the first fund-raising effort for a new $225,000 school that will have solar power and computers in the classrooms. The third area of effort is in micro lending, where small loans are made to individuals to start them in business. Their final area of concentration is organizing and running trips to Haiti for individuals who want to do volunteer work on projects in the country.
Haiti Outreach is a non-profit 501C3 corporation established in 1997 to help foster community-initiated projects to help improve the life of the people of Haiti. Currently the group has 37 employees, mostly in Haiti. This country is the poorest nation in our hemisphere, and in addition to being at the bottom of the scale in all monetary measures, is low on all of the health scales, and has corruption at all levels of government. Add to that the devastation of the earthquake last year which killed an estimated 300,000 Haitians, and you have an idea of the problems that face these people.
"Working Together Building Communities" is the slogan of Haiti Outreach, and the organization enables and funds community initiated projects. The key to their program is that any project they support has to have local community and government "buy-in". For example, they have built schools in Haiti; no school will be built unless the board of education makes a commitment to provide teachers and funding, and the local governments and citizens agree to maintain and care for the buildings. Once those commitments are made, the actual building is started. They have completed 2 secondary schools, and one addition to an existing school.
Haiti Outreach is acting in four areas to reduce poverty and need in Haiti. First, most of their efforts have been in providing clean water to residents (they have funded and drilled 70 wells in central Haiti which provide safe water to over 100,000 residents). Their second focus has been on building secondary public schools, as only 18% of the children have access to education after grade school. The icy dive in Fish Lake in January was the first fund-raising effort for a new $225,000 school that will have solar power and computers in the classrooms. The third area of effort is in micro lending, where small loans are made to individuals to start them in business. Their final area of concentration is organizing and running trips to Haiti for individuals who want to do volunteer work on projects in the country.
(Story by Tad Shaw and photo and posting by Steve Frazier)