The Mission of Haiti Outreach

“To collaborate with the people of Haiti to build and maintain community-initiated projects that advance their development."

This is how we operate – this is what we do – in order to bring this vision into reality. Each part of our mission statement is very important in describing what we do:

• We collaborate with the people of Haiti – We work with neighbors, community groups, local governments and the national government in rural Haiti as well as more populated areas.
• We build and maintain projects – A crucial aspect of our projects is that they are created to be sustainable on a long-term basis. Our projects are thus designed to develop Haiti, not just provide relief. Community groups use the economy, the exchange of money for services, to sustain these projects so that they are not dependent on us for their maintenance and repair. Even though most people are very poor, they contribute something for the services they receive. These funds are saved by the community, supervised publicly with transparency, to be used as needed for the project’s upkeep.
• Projects are community-initiated – Our projects are initiated by the people in these communities, not by us. Community participation and responsibility continues throughout the entire life of any project, from beginning to end, and then beyond.

Our work to date has been in the three major areas of clean water, education, and economic development. We collaborate with many other organizations on our projects and hope to expand our services to include agriculture, medical services, and infrastructure such as roads and electricity.

Clean Water – We drill wells and help create basic water systems in mostly small towns and rural communities.

Education – We build public schools. We have an agreement with the Ministry of Education that they will administer and run the schools if we build them.

Economic Development- We collaborate with Fonkoze, a Haitian micro-lending bank, to create lending opportunities for mostly poor women in rural communities.

Agriculture – We have begun a partnership with Mindful Generations to create a pilot project for permaculture in Pignon, including setting up sample gardens and teaching local farmers about sustainable agriculture.