About Us
Rotary is an organization of business and professional men and women united worldwide who provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help build goodwill and peace in the world.
Haiti Outreach’s vision is for Haiti to become a developed country, with adequate clean water, food, sanitation, medical care, roads, electricity, education and job opportunities for all. Their mission is to collaborate with the people of Haiti to build and maintain community-initiated projects that advance their development.
We invite you and other Rotary Club’s to participate in an exciting Rotary-sponsored project that will help change the lives and futures of Haitians by greatly increasing the opportunities for the adults and children of this country. It is a multi-Club, multi-District, multi-Country collaborative effort that we hope will continue and grow for years to come. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world, yet only 600 miles from the Florida coast. We are committed to working with the people of Haiti to make a lasting difference in the lives of the millions of people who live in this nation.
Three Rotary Clubs formed the initial partnership with the first commitment to build a public secondary school in the Haitian town of La Victoire – an area of over 10,000 people in the Central Plateau region of the country, with no public school available beyond 6th grade. This is an area of the country where Rotary has already had very strong and sustainable success with the innovative Safe Water Plus initiative. The Safe Water Plus Rotary Project raised funds to build new wells, rehabilitate many more, and create latrines involving over 100 communities in the Central Plateau of Haiti.
The Partnership’s first school project was completed with the inauguration of the La Victoire public secondary school in 2010. Our next endeavor was to raise funds and build a similar public secondary school in the town of Rankit. This town of 20,000 people also did not have a public secondary school building. This project was completed with the inauguration of the school in January of 2013.
Our next Rotary Partnership for Haiti Project is the building of 35 community clean water wells in the rural areas around Cap Haiti and Pignon. We have applied for matching grants with Rotary International and need to raise at least $50,000 to make this 2 year project happen. It should bring clean water to at least 13,000 people whose only water source is contaminated rivers or water holes.
Contaminated water is the #1 cause of the death of infants and young children worldwide. The opportunities to collaborate and make a major difference in Haiti and change this story for this country are significant, and the need for our service is very real! Nearly half of the people in the country still must get heir water from contaminated sources. Will you join us and make a difference and save lives??
If you are a Rotarian, we would also welcome the opportunity to attend a future meeting of your Club and provide a presentation about this project, as well as to answer any questions. We also invite you to email or call us for more information.
Sincerely,
Olaf Minge
Minneapolis City of Lakes Rotary ClubRon Axel
PDG Rotary District 5950
Dale Snyder
Minneapolis Uptown Rotary Club and Haiti Outreach
The History Of 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.
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 initially 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 build, 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 then raised funds in 2011 and 2012 for a public secondary school in the town of Rankit. Rankit is about 10 miles from La Victoire. This school was completed and inaugurated in January of 2013. They also did not have a public secondary school for their teenagers to attend. Today, they do!
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 raised the money for the Rankit School in just over 12 months. As you read above, we are now on to our next project, which is 35 clean community managed water wells. Today, we have many other Rotary Club partners, including ones in Wisconsin, Toronto, Pennsylvania, and Germany! The more partners we have, the more we can accomplish!
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 and adults 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 the Rotary Partnership for Haiti built. Visit the community managed clean water wells that YOU AND YOUR ROTARY CLUB helped to build!