HelpHaiti April Update

Your contributions to the HelpHaiti Fund now total $1.3 million, including over $350k secured by our partners in response to challenge grants. We’ve distributed nearly $1mm, including the $350k.

Our partners in Haiti continue to do outstanding work. I’ve written to you previously about Partners in Health, Concern Worldwide, and Catholic Relief Services. Most recently, Concern Worldwide met a $100k challenge grant and now $200k is being invested in five Child Friendly Spaces, giving children 5 to 15 years old the time and space to have structured, constructive, creative learning and play time to bring normalcy to their lives.  The Child Friendly Spaces will have links into Concern’s primary education program and will enable them to identify children that have never been in school before. Over time, as classroom space and schools re-open, these spaces will segue into long-term education programs expected to serve approximately 30,000 children.

To invest in economic empowerment we have identified a new partner, recently granting $50k to Fonkoze. They are “Haiti’s alternative bank for the organized poor,” the largest micro-finance institution in the country with over 55,000 women borrowers and 175,000 savers. Fonkoze has 42 branches spread throughout the country and the women (clients) are organized into 2,000 centers, each comprised of 30 – 50 women. We are evaluating additional funding opportunities from this partner which is well known and respected by each of our existing partners. Our due diligence supports investing your monies for economic empowerment through this agency, operating in Haiti since 1994.

We continue to evaluate additional funding opportunities including water projects, additional education and economic empowerment investments, and ways to further reach the most remote populations. By issuing challenge grants, your money has enabled the agencies to raise even more resources to help those devastated by the earthquake. Your contributions are literally bringing food, water, medical services, shelter, programs for children and economic assistance to tens of thousands of Haitians. Thank you for your generosity.

Phil Siegel, GP

Austin Ventures

HelpHait, Grants Committee Chair

Twestival Raises $450k+

(Entrepreneurs Foundation) Twestival raised $450k+ for Concern Worldwide, including $200k for education programs in Haiti.  EF/AV’s HelpHaiti fund matched $100k and was sited by events all over the world in the days leading up to the March 25 event.  Congratulations to Aamanda Rose, social entrepreneur extraordinaire and organizer of Twestival.

Twestival Challenge Grant

(Entrepreneurs Foundation) the Entrepreneurs Foundation/Austin Ventures HelpHaiti Fund has announced a $100,000 challenge grant benefiting Concern Worldwide’s Haiti earthquake relief efforts and Twestival.  We will match the first $100,000 raised by the Twestival on March 25 for Concern Worldwide.

HelpHaiti Donations Top $1.1mm

(Entrepreneurs Foundation) A quick update on your HelpHaiti fund.

We’ve now raised $1,172k, which includes $256k raised by Partners in Health, Concern Worldwide and Catholic Relief Services as a result of HelpHaiti challenge grants we issued and have since funded.  The $1.2mm also includes a $100k donation by the Lance Armstrong Foundation & Radio Shack.

Including the challenge monies raised, we’ve now distributed $704k – 36% to initial emergency relief and 21% to each: food & water, health & sanitation, and shelter (including temporary housing).

Our grants committee is meeting this week and has also prioritized investment in schools/education and economic empowerment.  We have proposals from several agencies providing or planning to provide education for the children of Haiti.  We continue to gather information on opportunities to invest in programs that allow Haitians to rebuild or launch their entrepreneurial initiatives in order to pump dollars into their economy and allow families some form of economic self sufficiency.

If you’re asking why we haven’t immediately sent all the money, many agencies are well funded for intermediate needs – people and organizations from around the world have sent hundreds of millions in cash plus even more in-kind.  We are in contact with each of our partner agencies and their current efforts are funded.  We look to invest your monies in ways the grants committee believes impacts your and our partners’ priorities.  From the very beginning, we’ve acknowledged that the people of Haiti need us to remember them not only immediately but also in the months ahead – and we continue to do so.

In today’s New York Times there is an article on the state of schools in Haiti http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/world/americas/07schools.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1267908721-5eKRzwzcH9lG+HwKuOjHGA

And, a Concern Worldwide staff member in Haiti posted about a song booming in the streets of Haiti, declaring their pride and intention to rebuild their communities.  There’s a video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcRPA41nYSk&feature=player_embedded

Haiti Update

(Entrepreneurs Foundation) Quick updates taken from the agencies’ websites:

Partners in Health: launching a plan to bring emergency crops to harvest in as little as 3 months.  The Inter-American Development Bank puts recovery and rebuilding costs in Haiti as high as $14 billion. PiH mobile clinics in Port au Prince performed 746 HIV tests between 2/7-2/21; 39 tested positive. Between 2/7-2/21: PIH/ZL mobile clinics saw 10,432 patients in settlements for homeless earthquake survivors. [they’ve done so much more than this – literally helped save thousands, are feeding and caring for tens of thousands]

Concern Worldwide: We have a great team of more than 250 staff now working in Port-au-Prince. 230 of them are Haitian, and we’re recruiting more every day.  Heading up the emergency team are some of our most capable and experienced staff members.  Per Andersson, our Emergency Engineering Manager, is more experienced in water and sanitation than anyone else I know. Tom Dobbin has being doing food distributions in emergencies in Africa for 20 years. Kate Golden has led Concern’s emergency programmes for the most vulnerable children in Sudan, Ethiopia and Democratic Republic of the Congo.   Ted Shine has worked in every large-scale emergency around the world in the last 10 years. It’s an impressive team, and we need every single one of them because we have a huge job to do.

There is nothing fancy and nothing small about what we’re doing here. We are simply ensuring that thousands of families have the basics for survival.We’re already providing clean water and latrines to over 50,000 people. More than 30,000 have received a shelter kit, blankets, jerry cans and a hygiene kit. Thousands of children have been screened for malnutrition. In the coming weeks, we’ll be providing 15,000 children with supplementary food. We are providing education for 30,000 children and seeds, tools and goats for 5,000 farmers.Water distribution has been a big priority from day one, and Concern is now providing 188,500 litres of clean drinking water to 53,000 people every day.

Catholic Relief Services: As Haiti paused to mark the one-month anniversary of the earthquake that devastated its capital city of Port-au-Prince, Catholic Relief Services reached our own milestone—providing food to a half-million people in the country. CRS donors continue to demonstrate their care for the people of Haiti, giving or pledging $60.4 million for relief operations. Now attention is turning to providing shelter as the rainy season looms a month or so away.

CRS distributed emergency shelter kits—waterproof sheeting, lumber and nails—to an estimated 6,500 families (about 32,500 people) at the Petionville golf course, where close to 50,000 people now live under sheets and other materials that will be useless as protection once the rainy season begins in March. The week of February 15, CRS will be distributing 10,000 more of these shelter kits to families in smaller camps and settlements, and at Champ de Mars, the grassy area in front of the heavily damaged government buildings in the center of Port-au-Prince.