TWP, founded in 1998, believes that natural resources are best protected when local people play an active role in their care and management, and preserving local trees, wetlands and watersheds is essential to the world’s social, economic and environmental health.

In Central America, more than 80% of the people cook their meals over open fires. This fire and smoke causes problems with deforestation, releases large amounts of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, burn risks, and medical problems such as respiratory infections and eye diseases.

TWP has helped develop several types of fuel-efficient stoves that use up to 70% less wood than traditional open fire stoves. TWP and local partners have built more than 20,000 fuel-efficient stoves in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The stoves are also being supplied to Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia and Haiti.

The stoves can be manufactured locally. TWP stoves include a chimney that vents toxic smoke to the outside of the home.

In Guatemala, a typical fuel-efficient stove from TWP gives an average family a cost savings of $10.50/month. With 70% of Guatemalans earning less than $2 per day, the savings is very important to the average family.

TWP has created community reforestation projects in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Since 1998, TWP has helped grow and plant almost 1,500,000 trees in Central America. The programs help local people protect their water supplies, replant degraded forests, increase their incomes and learn agroforestry techniques to preserve their soil.

Local entrepreners are also trained to operate sustainable tree nurseries.

Additional information on donation or volunteer opportunities and other program details can be found on their website.

The primary country of focus at this time is El Salvador. The population of El Salvador is slightly more than 6-million, and approximately 36% of the people live below the poverty line.

In a Partner School program, students from the U.S. schools log on for an interactive experience with the Salvadoran students … either in Spanish or translated to English.

Cultural lessons range from daily activities to regional history. Lessons are transmitted via free, downloadable video conferencing software from Skype. The only hardware you need is a webcam and a microphone.

The Sister School program connects American and internationally sponsored schools in a deeper relationship with a long term focus. Projects can include fundraising drives, cultural immersion trips and other types of cooperation.

In cooperation with a local organization, CEI has helped to build the Louise Naumann Resource Center in the rural community of Tepecoyo. The computer lab serves students in primary and secondary schools, along with adults in the community. A nutrition project near the computer lab provides soy milk and snacks between computer classes and attendance at school.

Other nutrition and educational projects have been developed with other cities.

Additional information on school partnership opportunities, donation opportunities, and other program details can be found on their website.

Some of the projects include:

* Medical Teams - Treating 75 to 200 patients per day.

* Dental Teams - Extracting, filling and dental hygiene and education.

* Pharmacy Teams - Supplying medicine (vitamins, Band-Aids, Tylenol, cold medicine, etc.) to 100 to 200 patients per day.

* Eye Teams - Provides free glasses and eye exams. Volunteers go to local schools to conduct eye exams.

* Peanut Butter and Jelly Mission - Providing free food to children who have walked up to 6 hours to see the medical teams.

* ‘Help a Kid’ Project - $50 sponsorship of a child in Honduras will provide vitamins, food, school books, and tuition.
 
* Sewing School - Set up a sewing school to teach adult females a viable trade. New and used sewing machines, materials, instructors for 1-week stays, patterns and other supplies are needed.

* Woodworking School - The village of Plan de Flores is the base for this vocational school that teaches woodworking to the local youth.

* School Assistance - Provides pencils, paper, Spanish language books, and other school supplies for local schools.

More information on volunteering, donating goods or financial aid, and other program details can be found on their website.

The main focus of Common Hope is on providing educational opportunities for those who otherwise would not have that opportunity. Once that relationship is established, social workers from Common Hope identify specific needs of each family and work to ensure families have ways to meet these needs.

These needs might be paying for tuition, dental check-ups, building a new house, taking literacy classes, providing building materials for home improvements, building stoves and latrines, filling medical prescriptions, and other types of aid. Vocational training is also offered, along with day care centers, to provide a safe place for parents to leave their children during working hours.

Over 56% of the people in Guatemala live below the poverty line. Education is not free, and many families cannot pay for education for their children. There is one doctor for every 1,100 people. Nearly 90% of the farms are too small to provide a decent standard of living.

In Antigua, the Family Development Center serves about 8,000 people.

Near Guatemala City, the New Hope Village has been built and a new primary school is attended by more than 200 students.

In the village of San Rafael, affiliations have been established with over 50 students and their families.

In the Ixcan jungle, a school is attended by over 80 students.

Scholarships are provided to students in other areas, and teachers are being trained.

Information on donating, volunteering, sponsoring a child, collecting supplies, and other program details can be found on Common Hope’s website.

The Esperanza project was started in 1996 by L.J. Oliva, RPA-C Physician Assistant, after making several medical trips to the former Soviet Union, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. The ratio of patients to doctors in the Dominican Republic is about 12,000 to 1.  Many people have no access to health care.

All staff are American trained and licensed volunteer medical professionals.

Medical, surgical, orthopedic, dental and prosthetic limb services are performed at Esperanza’s local clinic, where local Dominican physicians often work together with American volunteers.

Esperanza works in local clinics in the barrios with Dominican nurses and physicians to create a cross cultural learning experience, where medical as well as social needs are shared.

Medical and surgical supplies, including vaccinations, purchased by Esperanza are distributed to poorly stocked hospitals and small clinics. Vaccination clinics are organized.

Prosthetic limb services are fabricated and refurbished, and when necessary, referrals are made to surgeons in the United States.

Major health issues in the Dominican Republic include parasitic infections, chronic dysentery, malnutrition, pneumonia, and multiple congenital deformities. Children very often fail to receive necessary immunizations for Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, Polio or Tuberculin skin testing.

Information on donation opportunities, volunteer opportunities and other program details can be found on their website.

Caleb Lucien founded HIM in 1984 to help residents of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, find opportunities to improve their lives physically and spiritually. After growing up in Haiti, Caleb attended Washington Bible College in Maryland and then completed two master’s degrees at Dallas Theological Seminary. In 1989, Caleb returned to Haiti to begin the work of HIM.

Current projects of Hosean International Ministries include:

Camp de la Grace - A retreat center which hosts outreaches each year to men, women and children.

College de la Grace - HIM founded the first secondary school (K-13) in the Pignon community which now has over 900 students and over 110 teachers and staff. The school has been operating for 15 years. A book bank has been established to provide much needed books for the students who could not afford to purchase books (neither local schools or the local government provide books).

A student sponsorship program provides free tuition, a hot meal every day, 50% reimbursement of medical care costs, one uniform each year and school supplies. Local families donate a loving home and sponsors donate $1/day.

Layton Stamper Children’s Home - Founded in 1984, the Home provides a safe residence for children with no alternatives.

Electrical Project - Street lights and home electricity is being provided through a partnership with the National Rural Electrical Co-ops of America.
A team of volunteers from Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church of Moorhead, Minnesota came to Haiti in January, 2008 to finish the work on the new elementary school second story roof.

Two members of St. Mark’s Baptist Church of Little Rock, Arkansas volunteered their plumbing skills in January.

A crew of electrical linesmen from Minnesota checked connections and trained the local electrical co-op staff.

The Micanopy Christian Fellowship group from Florida arrived in March and worked on needed repairs at the school campus and helped Habitat for Humanity build homes for the local community.

Four members of Summer Street Church of Nantucket, MA taught a seminar on the teaching style of Jesus to over 100 teachers in March.

Information on volunteer and donation opportunities and other program details can be found on their website.

AYUDA was founded by two teenagers, Nicolas Cuttriss and Jesse Fuchs-Simon, in 1996 after witnessing the hardships associated with diabetes in Latin America. Today AYUDA works in countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Belize, Chile, Mexico and Bermuda.

In Ecuador, AYUDA has brought more than 130 volunteers and has provided over two million dollars in donated diabetes supplies and professional medical services. An annual diabetes camping program has hosted over 600 campers in its 7 years of operation. AYUDA also worked to develop a national diabetes organization in Ecuador, the Fundacion Diabetes Juvenil Ecuador.

In 1998, AYUDA’s educational workbook, Managing Diabetes, was published by the Pan American Health Organization and distributed throughout Latin America.

AYUDA organized the first annual international diabetes youth leadership conference in Lima, Peru in 2003 with youth leaders from 14 countries attending.

The 3 main objectives of AYUDA are:
1. Empower passionate youth to become leaders of social change.
2. Strengthen local diabetes communities by promoting youth leadership.
3. Motivate youth with diabetes to lead healthier and happier lives.

American youth volunteers from AYUDA work together with international partners to conduct local outreach projects, youth-led leadership seminars, family workshops, train-the-trainer courses and diabetes camps for children.

Information on volunteering, donating and their activities can be found on their website.

After a trip to Nicaragua in 2003, Karen Gordon founded Cup for Education (CFE) after seeing firsthand that so many coffee communities either did not have schools or did not have adequate materials and teachers for their children. Some kids had to travel hours to distant towns to attend schools, and libraries, science equipment, chalkboards, notebooks and other school supplies were often not available.

Some of the projects for Cup for Education include:

* Beans for Books - Donated funds for library and text books for communities devastated by Hurricane Stan in Guatemala.

* MEDICO Project 2007 - Sponsored the cost of shipping supplies, educational materials and schools supplies for the MEDICO organization’s volunteer medical and educational assistance project in Honduras. Six small remote schools received notebook paper, construction paper, new pencils, colored markers, crayons, folders, binders, glue, flash cards in Spanish, books in Spanish, maps, games and other classroom supplies.

* Project Safe Passage - CFE donated a library table and chairs for the school in Guatemala.

More information on their programs and donation opportunities are available on their website.

MFK supplies Medika Mamba (’peanut butter medicine’), an energy dense peanut butter, significantly fortified with protein and nutritional supplements.It needs no cooking or preparation (no fuel is needed), and doesn’t spoil. In 6 to 8 weeks, the Medika Mamba can bring great results in restoring height, weight, hair growth, and energy in young kids.

Medika Mamba is also produced locally in Haiti, providing jobs for Haitians and markets for peanut farmers in Haiti. Peanut farmers are taught best practices to decrease aflatoxin. Ingredients include peanuts, powdered milk, sugar, oil, vitamins and minerals.

The current factory in Haiti employs 18 people, and 6,000 to 8,000 children are expected to be treated over two years. Medika Mamba has the potential to treat all the 160,000 malnourished Haitian children.

It takes an average of 15 kg to cure a child, which at $4.25/kg, amounts to $68 to save a child’s life using Medika Mamba.

In Haiti, 129 of every 1,000 children will die before their fifth birthday … compared to 8 per 1,000 children in the USA.

Information on donations volunteering in Haiti or St. Louis, fundraising and their activities is available on the Meds & Food for Kids website.

In 2006, 4,054 tractor-trailers of aid were distributed.
In 2007, 4,340 tractor-trailers of aid were distributed (over $1-billion)

In Jamaica, more than 1,800 churches work as distribution partners for food, medicine, educational supplies and other needed items. Haiti has a network of over 2,000 partner schools, churches, hospitals, orphanages and other non-governmental organizations that distribute the goods. Other countries in the region assisted include Antigua, Argentina, Belize, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Trinidad, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Food For the Poor’s mission is to link the church of the First World with the church of the Third World in a manner that helps both the materially poor and the poor in spirit. FFTP collects funds from North American and European benefactors, purchases the goods, and ships them to partner countries for distribution through churches and charity organizations already operating in the areas of need.

FFTP believes that education and self-help must fortify charity work so recipients can break the cycle of poverty. FFTP programs include:

1. FEEDING- Food distribution programs are set up with churches, schools, hospitals, missionaries and other charitable organizations such as Salvation Army, Caritas, the American-Nicaraguan Foundation and others. The main feeding program at Port-au-Prince alone feeds an estimated 15,000 people each weekday. FFTP also partners with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). One example of this program is a school feeding program in Guatemala that serves more than 100,000 children a year, with an additional 160,000 children, family members, teachers and caregivers receiving take-home rations. More than 32-million pounds of food provided through USDA grants were distributed in 2006.

2. HOUSING - FFTP has built more than 40,000 basic housing units since it began its work. The homes provide shelter, and also provide income for local workers who build the homes.

3. EDUCATION - FFTP ships books, school supplies, furniture, computers and other items to schools in the Caribbean and Latin America. Used furniture and equipment from school districts in the USA are received and shipped to needy schools.

4. MEDICAL CARE - FFTP solicits donations from major manufacturers of medical supplies and medicines for delivery to its partners. In Haiti, FFTP operates a full-service hospital and outpatient clinics, as well as providing medical supplies to other hospitals, clinics, AIDS facilities, homes for the elderly and orphanages throughout the region.

5. ORPHANAGES - More than 450 orphanages received aid from FFTP in 2006, and FFTP donors have sponsored over 3,000 children in 9 countries.

6. WATER PROJECTS - Since 1998, FFTP has completed more than 300 water projects in areas where women and children often have to walk for hours each day to find clean water. 

7. MICRO-ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT- FTTP works to provide long-term sustainable solutions to poverty with projects such as fishing villages in Haiti and Jamaica, agricultural research and training centers in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Tilapia farms in Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, animal rearing projects, woodworking shops, sewing enterprises, automobile repair shops and bakeries.

8. EMERGENCY RELIEF- Food, water, building supplies and emergency aid are provided after natural disasters. Besides the Caribbean and Latin America areas, assistance was sent to the tsunami victims in Indonesia in 2004 and to USA victims of recent hurricanes.

Information on donation opportunities and other programs is available through their website.