Helping Haiti: Focusing on Long-term Needs
Posted by Billy Shore on Monday, April 12, 2010
Today I’ll be returning to Haiti, thanks to Timberland’s President and CEO Jeff Swartz and Chuck Scofield, Share Our Strength’s Chief Development Officer, who has been handling much of the planning and strategy for the trip. This time, we are taking a larger delegation that is well positioned to help with some of Haiti’s long-term needs. Our group will include former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey who has expertise on prosthetics, Winfried Denke of the Prosthetic Outreach Foundation, Cat Cora of Chefs for Humanity, and David Weiss of CHF International, among others.
The focus will be threefold: the World Food Program and hunger relief needs, long-term sustainable economic development, and the continuing medical challenges especially those faced by young amputees.
At the end of our last trip I told Jeff Swartz that it would have been understandable and acceptable if we’d chosen not to make the trip in the first place, but that having made the journey and seen what we’d seen, it would not be okay if we did not return.
Most of the world had never focused much on Haiti before the earthquake, and now attention has begun to recede as we all knew it would. But Share Our Strength® has been making grants in Haiti consistently for 20 years, whether it was in the news or not. We will, of course, continue to do so. That is at least one difference between charitable trend and moral commitment.
With virtually no direct solicitation, we’ve already raised around $200,000 for Haiti’s recovery and rebuilding. Some of the early grants we made surely saved lives. So did the millions of dollars of support we provided over the past two decades. And as this next trip reflects, we are helping to bring valuable expertise to bear on problems so complex that they will require the best among us to share their strength.
Because I’ll be in Port au Prince, I’ll be missing tonight’s DC Taste of the Nation event for only the second time in 20 years. Notwithstanding the differences in ambience, we’ll all be helping to make a vital difference here at home and in Haiti – at just the time the need is greatest.
April 12, 2010 | 0 comment(s) | Tags: childhood hunger, event, Haiti, Taste of the Nation
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