HELP: It sounds like a miracle, but it isn’t
/0 Comments/in Guest Author /by Conor BohanElice Oreste grew up in a remote, mountainous region of Haiti called Labiche. When he was born, Labiche had no roads, no utilities and no schools. Few in his community, including his parents, had ever been to school. Luckily for Elice, a local resident who had been educated, came back to the area and started a primary school. The first year, it had one room, the second year, two rooms, and so on. Elice’s mother said that since she had never spent a single day in school, when Elice started school she could only give him a pencil, a notebook and a prayer.
Elice lived with his parents and four siblings in a two room house; they got by on the revenues from his parents small plot of land but things were always tight in Labiche so people made do with what they had. Elice developed an early interest in music, and at the age of 12 he built his first guitar from scrap wood.
Luckily for Elice, just as he graduated at the top of his class in primary school, the government built the region’s first-ever secondary school in neighboring Grigri. However, it was a two hour walk from his house, each way. Elice did that walk every school day for five years and still finished high school with a straight-A average.
But university was out of the question. Not only had no one in Labiche ever been to university, Elice’s family could barely afford to pay for the seven hour bus ride to the capital, let alone books or housing or tuition. So he apprenticed himself to a local carpenter at a monthly salary of $50. Elice’s life was pretty much set. He would apprentice at the same salary until he was ready to go out on his own and maybe end up making $200 a month.
One day HELP (Haitian Education & Leadership Program) showed up at the high school in Gris Gris, offering university scholarships for straight-A students. The Principal said he didn’t have any that year but he told them about Elice who had just graduated the year prior, and we left an application. Thankfully, Elice got the application and that September he began an industrial engineering degree at Haiti’s oldest private university. At school he was consistently on the Dean’s List and when he graduated in 2014, he secured a summer internship with an energy company in Green Bay, Wisconsin. On his return to Haiti Elice found a job as junior maintenance engineer at the local Heineken brewery at a starting salary of $18,000 a year – 30 times what he had made as an apprentice.
Despite his success, Elice remains attached to his humble roots and committed to improving his hometown. He returns often to Labiche where he has transformed a musical group he started with some friends into a educational and charitable group which awards prizes for the top local students and distributes food to the most needy, who Elice describes as “those that haven’t eaten in two or three days.”
When Elice talks about his story he says, “It sounds like a miracle, but it isn’t. It’s real. And we are only just beginning. We are going to change Labiche, and we are going to change Haiti.”
We are losing more than 30 scholarships from institutional funders this year. Despite a record 291 straight-A applicants, we can only admit 20 freshmen next month, our smallest class in five years. It will also be the first time in HELP’s history that student enrollment will shrink from one year to the next. With 160 students, HELP is still strong but we would like to be stronger to provide opportunity to an increasing number of students.
Help make a difference by donating and sharing this blog with your friends and family!
About the Blogger:
Conor Bohan, HELP Founder & Executive Director, lived and worked in Haiti from 1996 to 2008. Under his leadership, HELP has grown from a single student to the largest university scholarship program in Haiti. In addition to growing HELP, he was a volunteer teacher, Deputy Director of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Haiti, and Director of Haiti Programs for the American Institutes for Research (AIR). Conor has a B.A. in History from Brown University and was named one of the Hemisphere’s Innovators by Americas Quarterly Magazine and is a recent Ashoka Fellow.
Your voice matters on Capitol Hill
/0 Comments/in Guest Author /by Colin SmithA friend of mine took her first job in a congressional office this spring, after many years working in D.C. “What surprised you most behind the scenes on Capitol Hill?” I asked her just a few weeks into the new role. Without missing a beat, she answered, “How much influence just one constituent can have.”
That’s not the standard line about Washington. But it’s the one I hear every day in my job at RESULTS. I hear it from our volunteers across the country who experience the same thing from the other side – as constituents.
People like Barbara in Miami, Ginnie in Columbus, and Andy in Tacoma are the heart of RESULTS, a movement of passionate, committed everyday people. Each of them is that “one constituent” asking local members of Congress to prioritize the things that matter: things like health, education, and economic opportunity. Together they use their voices to influence political decisions that will bring an end to poverty.
When our volunteers call their members of Congress, it’s not from a fancy lobbying firm. It’s from their cell phones, on their lunch breaks, or between classes. And when they meet their members of Congress, it’s as a voter who Congress was elected to represent.
It’s not always easy at first; but they get detailed training and support from RESULTS staff in Washington and a network of volunteers across the country. Minh, a graduate student in Houston, had never spoken to a member of Congress at this time last year. After practicing all night for one of his first congressional meetings, he said, “I was nervous to the point that I was visibly shaking.”
Minh went anyway. And he got hooked. A year later, Minh’s already had a whopping 12 face-to-face meetings with members of Congress and another 16 with their staff.
Volunteers learn to work with the media, too. Last year, I watched in awe as Bob got published in the New York Times, Lisa was in the Washington Post, and Willie was in TIME magazine. They’re not PR professionals or journalists. They’re volunteers writing their letters and op-eds at home, often with multiple drafts and tracked changes (kind of like how I’m writing this blog post).
Not more than a year ago, a volunteer told me she was almost in tears because writing her first letter to the editor seemed so daunting. Since then she’s had over a dozen published in the biggest papers in her state.
They do all this because they’ve seen the power of advocacy: by helping shift government policies and investments, their work touches the lives of millions.
Our volunteers come to RESULTS for all different reasons…
- Some collect donations for local food pantries, and now also push Congress to support SNAP (formerly “food stamps”), a program helping millions of hardworking American families put food on the table.
- Others trick-or-treated for UNICEF as kids. Now they ask Congress to do its part by investing billions of dollars in the world’s most vulnerable children.
- A handful of them are even teachers who spend their days in the classroom, and spend their nights calling on the President to support quality education for all.
And their voices are changing the world. Just this last year, RESULTS advocates helped fight back billions of dollars in proposed cuts to SNAP. They helped secure landmark investments from our government to support the world making sure every child has access to vaccines and every child has access to education. Together they’re helping make the end of poverty a bipartisan priority, call-by-call, letter-by-letter, meeting-by-meeting.
How about you? What issues do you care about? Want to multiply your impact across the country and around the world?
Join us at the RESULTS International Conference next month in Washington, D.C., to learn new skills, meet advocates from around the world, and take your message straight to Capitol Hill. Don’t know how advocacy works? Come anyway – we’ll learn together.
**Exclusive A Path Appears discount for the RESULTS Conference, enter “IC100” at registration.
Colin Smith is the Director of Communications for RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. Every day he gets to come to work to support a network of passionate, committed every-day people across the country who are using their voices to change the world.
Let’s Honor Mothers this May!
/0 Comments/in Events /by Alejandra SacioIt’s that time of year, when we honor all women around the world! We hope you will join our new fundraising challenge to celebrate. If you raise over $200 for one of our partners investing in moms, you will have a chance to win one of Liza Donnelly’s one-of-a-kind sketches tweeted during the television premiere of A Path Appears.
It’s easy to participate! Select an organization supporting moms on our Crowdrise page, and get your friends and family excited about helping and honoring women. If ten of your friends donate $20 each, you will be entered into our prize drawing.
Here’s how to enter:
- Create a group on our Crowdrise Page (only groups created after April 23rd will be considered)
Share your fundraiser on Facebook and Twitter. - Once you reach your $200 goal, e-mail [email protected]. Every additional $200 raised counts as an entry, so aim high!
The EXTENDED deadline is May 31st (11:59PM) and the winner will be announced on June 1st! So that means, you’ll have all the month of May to honor mothers.
Here are just a few examples of the our partner organizations that are working with mothers:
- Save the Children (USA) - Their early childhood program, as seen on A Path Appears, helps struggling mothers through the critical formative years of their child’s life.
- Juan Felipe Gomez Escobar Foundation (Colombia) - The JuanFe Foundation helps pregnant teen mothers to gain the necessary skills to lift themselves out of poverty, and gives them the tools they need to better care for their child.
- Women’s Resource Center for Domestic Violence (USA) - The center helps women and families fleeing a life of violence, giving them a safe place to stay to reconstruct their lives and their children’s.
- Nurse-Family Partnership (USA) - The Nurse-Family Partnership is a home visitation program designed to help young new mothers create the right environment for their child to succeed.
- Edna’s Maternity Hospital (Somaliland) - Edna’s hospital not only helps to reduce maternal and infant mortality which is a dire problem in their community, but they also train hundreds of new midwives to reach mothers all over Somaliland.
These are just a few of the examples of some of our partners helping mothers around the globe. For a full list of our partners, visit our Crowdrise page.
We’ll be honoring mothers all month, and this Sunday’s Mother’s Day is the perfect place to start. Get your loved ones in the giving mood, and ask them to help you in creating real impact for mothers across the globe.
Let’s make May matter for mothers everywhere!