The Big Announcement

Many of you have been wondering what is up with Hope.

For a lot of reasons that I won't go into in this forum, we cannot continue to work with the current orphanage of Hope for Little Angels of Haiti.  For a lot of other reasons that I also won't go into we cannot keep using that name for fundraising and for our non-profit efforts in Haiti. 

We're not done in Haiti.  We're not done helping orphans.  We're not done trying to make things better. 


We've submitted the paperwork for a new "DBA" and we should have the state's approval back in the next few days.  As soon as that's in my hot little hands, we'll announce the new name and the new logo.


I can, however, tell you what the plans are.

I'd say it was a teaser to hold you over, but this is awesome stuff.  There will be official press releases soon.  But I figure not everyone who supports the org reads this blog and not everyone who reads this blog supports the non-profit, etc, etc. 

Here's the beef.

We've joined forces with Haitian Roots.  We're both still independent non-profit organizations, but we've realized that we have a lot in common with our goals and that both organizations can work well in partnership.

We've combined resources and purchased a nice-sized, multi-acre plot of land in the Haitian countryside.  More on the miracles there later. 

On that land, we will be building a school that will serve 150 children, a boarding home and an orphanage facility to support 50 children. It will be on enough land that they will be able to have chickens for food and income as well as vegetable gardens.  We have some contacts that we trust and know well that are running things on the ground.  The purchase of the land just happened this last week.

Shannon calls it a "Children's Village."  I love that name.   I think of it as a compound, but in a very "non-Waco" sort of way. 


Some of the children that Haitian Roots is sending to school were orphaned during the earthquake.  They're all in the care of a friend of ours down there.  Right now they're all living in tents in the backyard of an orphanage that was damaged during the quake.  It is for this reason that we'll have boarding at the new Children's Village.

See, we don't want to go through this again.  We don't want our people to starve.  We don't want them to be entirely dependent on foreign resources. We want a place where the people in the village can learn skills and learn a way to support their families - even if it's through raising vegetables for resale.  We want a place where the children have room to run and play - which they never did at the last orphanage.  It had a tiny cement spot barely big enough for 2 cars.  For all 68 kids.  We're not doing that again.

I'm happy to report that we've teamed up with the awesome people at Commonstudio.org.  They work with the architecture students at the U of U and they have taken on our project.  They will be studying the list of needs we gave them, the local building materials, the building methods, the land, etc and they will be designing our Children's Village.

We still have a lot of fund raising to do.  We have buildings to build and a facility to develop.  Some of our friends have hooked up again with Todd and Erin of B89.7 and they will be doing some amazing fund raising for us in 2 weeks at their annual Yard Sale.  Watch for more information on that. 

We firmly believe that life is what you make it.  And we're hoping to make a brighter life, a brighter future for Haiti - even if we have to do it one child at a time.