Students for Haiti-Building a clinic by May

The frustration and disgust I felt with the lack of healthcare in the rural Haitian villages last summer left me with one pressing thought “This needs to change.” With my heart two steps ahead of my brain, I made a commitment to build a clinic in one of the villages called Mouliliage Fouquet. Now I had just one question “how?” I discovered that the hospital I was working for, St. Boniface, receives annual funding through USAID AIDs relief grants. People don’t die of AIDS, they die of influenza, a fever, or some other condition. So, a rural clinic that provides care for such common ailments qualifies under this AIDS relief grant. Out of the $600,000 St. Boniface is eligible for, it can only utilize ~$480,000 in the name of AIDS relief. If they can’t utilize it, they don’t get the money. This means that $120,000 is unused each year. That money, each year, will now be used for the clinic. 25 years from now the clinic will have funding because of theses grants. Thus, the clinic will be completely sustainable in the short term as well as the long term. I also arranged that the actual construction would be completed by a Catholic Relief Service’s Food for Work Program, of which St. Boniface has previously used to build a school and parts of their hospital. Due to the grant’s stipulations, construction cannot be paid for with grant funds, leaving the only remaining obstacle to providing this community with the healthcare it deserves to be the $25,000 for construction. My first fundraising efforts were publicizing the cause. Four newspapers wrote about the clinic and a requested for donations. To further publicize and gain support for the cause, I founded Students For Haiti (SFH) and applied to be a registered student organization. Close to 3000 emails later and a frozen email account, I had 50 members. In an effort to gain further support, I gave over 20 presentations to fraternities, sororities and other student organizations. By co-sponsoring events, I not only increased the events participation, but it also enabled me to gain multi-organizational funding from the university, which decreased my expenses. So far we have co-hosted a Top Model event with Red Cross ($1400), a silent auction with The Hotel and Restaurant Management Club ($800), a street festival/concert with the Skid Row Club ($5000), and a Battle of the Bands with Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Theata Ki ($1300). Additionally, SFH has collected money at football games ($700), written over 150 family members and friends asking for donations (waiting), and set up tables at popular campus events, such as HAVEN’s annual drag show ($300). I have also received donations from the newspaper articles and website I created, students4haiti.com. I started writing companies and other organizations, asking to give a presentation. So far I have given presentations to two Rotary Clubs (waiting), New York Life (waiting), and representative from JP Morgan ($700). In these presentations I have stressed that everyone is a leader in this cause. Everyone who donates influences when Mouliliage Fouquet will see the healthcare they need and deserve. I have raise $10,000 so far and I am confident that I will raise $25000 by May. Every day that goes by is a day that someone in Mouliliage Fouquet doesn’t have the healthcare he or she needs.