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Upcoming Fundraising Event

3rd Annual Deep Freeze Dunk – January 21, 2012

Have the courage to jump into a frozen lake in Minnesota in January?? Help us raise funds for the Rankit Public Secondary School. Get your friends, relatives and co-workers to donate to see you take a dunk, or donate to someone else’s dunk (or help them raise money for their dunk). All donations are tax deductible, made out to Haiti Outreach. There are prizes for best costume, most money raised by an individual, and most money raised by a team! Click here for details.

PowerPoint About The Rankit School Building Project

About The Rotary Partnership For Haiti

In May, 2008 representatives, from several Rotary Clubs located across two different Rotary districts in Minnesota, together with representatives from Haiti Outreach, met to discuss how they might be able to combine their energy, talents and resources to most effectively make a big difference in the lives of the people in the Central Plateau region of Haiti. Haiti, as now almost everyone knows, is one of the poorest countries in the world, yet only 600 miles from Florida.

The result was the birth of the Rotary Partnership For Haiti, a collaboration of any Rotary Clubs that want to participate with the non-profit organization Haiti Outreach (www.HaitiOutreach.org) to create sustainable community development projects that advance the development of the country of Haiti.

The area that the group decided to focus their activities was education. Without an education, there will be few opportunities open to the next generation to make life any better. Currently, only about 55% of the Haitian people can read and write. Only about 10% of the children have a public school to attend. The government just doesn’t have the money to build the many schools they need.  Without public schools, parents and students are forced to resort to the few expensive private schools, which most people cannot afford, or not have their children get an education at all.

The Rotary Partnership For Haiti is committed to change that. We raised funds starting in 2008 to build our first public school – a secondary school in the town of La Victoire. It took about 18 months to raise the funds needed to build the school, but it is now complete and open! See the story on the La Victoire tab.

This school, like other public schools we will be building, are sustainable because Haiti Outreach has an agreement with the Haitian Ministry of Education that they will hire the teachers and administrators and run the school if a school can be built. They have built other public schools with this agreement in place and the Education Ministry has been running them ever since.

The Rotary Partnership For Haiti is now beginning to raise funds to build our next public school, in the town of Rankit. Rankit is about 10 miles from La Victoire. They also do not have a public secondary school for their teenagers to attend. That means that even if they attend primary school, they cannot advance beyond a sixth grade education.

We invite you and your Rotary Club to join our efforts. The Haitians have a proverb: “Many hands make the load lighter.” It took 18 months to raise the funds for the La Victoire School, plus another 5 months to get it built. We would be delighted if we could raise the money in less time so that the Rankit school can be built and open its door in September of 2012.

Rotary Clubs can voluntarily participate at whatever level they would like, including:

1)   donate money to the projects that the Rotary Partnership planning committee selects

2)   plan their own special events to fundraise specifically for those projects

3)   join the planning committee to work on public relations, marketing, supporting the various Clubs and their fundraising activities, discussing and making strategic decisions, etc.

Please contact us with any questions or would like to communicate how you and your Club can help. Join this extraordinary effort where you can make a long-lasting difference in the lives of hundreds and even thousands of children in Haiti. Join Haiti Outreach in one of their group trips to see the results – see the smiling faces and students learning every day in the school YOU helped to build!