Helping in Haiti
Photo:Matt Marek/American Red Cross
1/21 12:36 pm PST, edited the animal relief efforts
There is a lot of suffering in this world. We are all just small beings on a mid-size planet in a pretty darn big universe. And we should do compassionate, positive things every day, not just when something bad happens. That said, the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti has wreaked havoc upon an already highly impoverished country. People and undoubtedly nonhuman animals are suffering and in need of help.
If you want to assist monetarily, please do so. Truly, every small bit helps. And keep it up throughout the year in other, non monetary ways.
I will add more groups, particularly animal-related ones, as more information becomes available.
Please do your due diligence in researching each organization.Charity Navigator
Charitywatch list of relief organizations helping in Haiti
Better Business Bureau website.
Relief Efforts for People
Gerald Herbert
Doctors Without Borders
As of 1/19, there are more than 700 doctors in Haiti helping w/ the relief efforts. Read about their efforts here. As of 1/14/10, they are asking donors to give through an unrestricted account so that the nonprofit can continue to function and assist in ALL areas of the world as well as provide on-the-ground care in Haiti.
Food for Life Global
Provides vegetarian and vegan meals to impoverished people. As of 1/16/10, they are currently on the ground in the Domincan Republic and expect to start delivering food to Haitians next week.
As of 1/19, 16 pallets of medical supplies being airlifted by Fed Ex to St. Damien Children’s Hospital in Haiti. You can text Give10 to 20222 to donate $10 via your mobile phone. So far they have sent $2 million in direct relief aid via FedEx.
Yele Haiti
1/19: Wycleaf Jean defends his organization.1/16, allegations that Yele Haiti have possibly mismanaged funds in the past. They’ve raised about $1.5 million as of 1/15. You can text YELE to 501501 to donate $5.
Haiti Emergency Relief Fund
No word on specific relief efforts
Unicef
1/15: UNICEF is joining with the UN and calling on the global community to raise $562 million; UNICEF is trying to raise $120 million.They have been on the ground providing aid.
Partners in Health and donation form
With doctors already in Haiti when the earthquake hit, PIH has been able to provide some basic on-the-ground care since the quake. They say fuel is a huge problem soaring to $25/gallon. They have a water truck on the way. They are in desperate need of surgical supplies and doctors. They have 30 volunteers arriving 1/16.
Save the Children donation page
They have been in Haiti for 25 years. Text SAVE to 20222 and donate $10. Currently, they are working specifically to help children and reunite them with relatives, many of whom have been tragically killed.
WorldVision and its donation form
Also on the ground, their headquarters suffered major damage during the quake. They have been doing all they can to provide assistance to those affected.
ActionAid and its donation page
1/16, ActionAid relief team will be arriving 1/17, Sunday. Another on the ground group, ActionAid has been in Haiti for about twelve years – unfortunately as many as 20 of their 25 staff were affected by the quake. As of 1/13, ActionAid has sent an emergency response team to Haiti.
Oxfam and its press release for donations
1/15, Oxfam is providing supplies to assist in clean-up and working on getting potable water available. They will be coordinating international aid groups on water and sanitation. They had a team already on the ground prior to the quake and lost one OxFam employee.(If you are vegan, please note that Oxfam does have animal donation programs).
Red Cross donation form (You can read their wikipedia article for more information, see Sept 11 controversy.) As of 1/15, there are 12 teams of relief workers on the ground. They have raised $37 million so far.
Artists for Peace and Justice
They’ve been in Haiti for years and lost a lot of their friends and family b/c of the quake. After the primary response is over and rebuilding needs to occur:
FINCA is helping microfinance banks for women in Haiti
Architecture for Humanity is looking for donations in assisting with the rebuilding process. As of 1/13, they have raised $45,000 for rebuilding. They plan on working with other NGOs to assist in the recovery efforts.
Relief Efforts for Animals
SODOPRECA (spanish site) is a Dominican animal rescue group. You can donate here
As of 1/19: Best Friends is seeking qualified individuals to possibly be deployed.
As of 1/21, IFAW and WSPA are on the ground in the Dominican Republic, attempting to work out details for entering Haiti and assisting w/ providing help to the animals, with an emphasis on livestock (not rescuing, btw). The other members of the Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti appear to be suggesting donating strictly to IFAW & WSPA. According to this article (in spanish), WSPA has been working with SODOPRECA…no verification from SODOPRECA.
Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti (ARCH) is made up of several animal welfare organizations who will be assisting with the animals. It’s comprised of the following organizations: WSPA; International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW); United Animal Nations (UAN); American Humane Association (AHA); Humane Society International (HSI); Best Friends Animal Society; In Defense of Animals (IDA); American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)
The Christian Veterinary Mission
As obvious by their name, they are a religious organization.As of 1/16, they have been on the ground assisting people in the recovery effort.
Animal Groups Monitoring the Situation
American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) is currently monitoring the situation. As of 1/14, the AVMA is monitoring the situation.
PetSmart Charities is currently monitoring the situation
Mail:
- American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013
- US Fund for UNICEF, 125 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
- Doctors Without Borders USA, P.O. Box 5030, Hagerstown, MD 21741-5030
- Partners In Health, P.O. Box 845578, Boston, MA 02284-5578
Phone:
- Donations to the International Response Fund – 1-800-REDCROSS or 1-800-257-7575 (Spanish)
- Unicef – 1.800.FOR.KIDS (1.800.367.5437)
- Doctors Without Borders – 1-888-392-0392
Haiti is a horribly impoverished part of the world, even more so than its sister, adjacent Dominica.To have such a tragedy of this magnitude affect the country is devastating.
Please help. Remember, no donation is too small. Even if money is tight, surely you have $2-10 to spare – share it.
Stephanie Ernst
Marji
Kelly G.
Deb
Mary Martin
Red Cross is pretty racist and corporate. I donated there during Katrina and then decided never to again.
I have been given the following org to donate to, apparently recommended by orgs in Haiti and given to me by a trusted friend who knows her shit.
http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/HERF.html
Thought I’d add one of my favorite aid organizations: Direct Relief International (directrelief.org). 99% of their donations go to programs and only 1% towards administration and fundraising. When natural disasters occur and they provide aid, that 99% jumps to 100%.
http://www.directrelief.org/
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3626
Yes, do your homework! I donated to Madre.org only to find after poking around their website that they have one of those programs where you can buy a pig for a Guatamalan family. See http://bit.ly/8ObTJ2 for more on “gifting” animals. Oxfam also has an animal donation program :( At least my donation is earmarked for Haiti and may give me more clout when I write to complain! I think I will wait now and see if refugees end up in New York and look into helping locally.
Pamela Rice of VivaVegie Society sent this out today:
———-
Vegan food relief for Haitian victims of the Port au Prince earthquake
You’re seeing the images on television and you’re feeling helpless. You can do something right now.
We’re lucky we have a wonderful vegan food-relief organization to funnel your donations to earthquake victims in Haiti.
Go to: http://www.ffl.org/ and click on the gray box at top right of the Web page. You’ll be taken to your PayPal account.
Give generously. Relief groups need hard cash now to get needed humanitarian aid to victims immediately. Time is of the essence. Every hour, the situation in Port au Prince gets worse. I just heard that the Red Cross has run out of supplies, so you know things are bad.
Even if you yourself are on hard times, please give what you can now.
———-
Thanks for your suggestions, I’ve added them to the page.
(the direct relief international link kinda broke…)
Fixed!
IDA is also part of the Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti (ARCH), and is soliciting volunteers in addition to funds:
2) Sign up to volunteer! We are in the process of identifying volunteer needs, and locations where we can be of best use. If you have training, skills, and experience working in high risk disaster situations, especially in a veterinary or animal management role, and especially if you have Creole or French language skills, please contact Jessica at Jessica [at] idausa.org or 415-448-0048.
See: https://secure2.convio.net/ida/site/Donation2?df_id=1960&1960.donation=form1
Just in case anyone reading has time and expertise vs. money!
Actually, I think IDA took down its call for volunteers today – but now Best Friends is looking for Rapid Response volunteers w/experience in disaster relief and animal handling to deploy to Haiti: http://network.bestfriends.org/groups/rapidresponse/news/14128/post.aspx
Friends of Animals put out this critique, questioning ARCH:
“HSUS IFAW ASPCA Mislead Members”
http://www.friendsofanimals.org/news/2010/january/hsus-ifaw-aspca-misl.html
Thanks for the info, Brandon. It does concern me that some orgs – particularly the larger ones – are raising funds for rescue operations without actually having any idea how many nonhumans are in need of assistance in Haiti. And, um, what are they waiting for? I realize that flying directly into Haiti is difficult/impossible now, but if some groups have a presence in the Dominican Republic as claimed, why not cross the border asap?
That said, it also seems like the author of the piece is suggesting that rescue efforts need to focus on humans first and foremost (see, e.g., the last 4 paragraphs). She does say that “Being an animal and human rights advocate for the last 17 years, I can tell you that supporting orgs which only focus on one or the either in times like this, should not be supported.” – and yet (in the comments) she encourages readers to donate to Doctors Without Borders, which is most definitely an either/or org (i.e., I doubt they’d stop to help an injured dog or goat when there are “more important” tasks to attend to).
So while I think these are legitimate points of discussion, I’m not 100% sure what the author’s point is?
Also, re: there being no goats in Haiti, the Christian Veterinary Mission runs a livestock breeding program called “Give a Kid a Kid”. The SPCAI featured the CVM as a “Shelter of the Week,” and in the accompanying photos, children are seen with a flock of goats. I don’t know whether this was pre- or post-2008 hurricanes mentioned in the article, though. (see: https://www.spcai.org/programs/shelter-of-the-week/item/329-give-a-kid-a-kid-haiti.html)
Anyway, I guess the bottom line is research, question, research – and only donate to those groups with which you feel most comfortable.
Interesting.
Just looking through flickr, though, of recent Haitian photos leads me to believe there was a thriving dog and livestock population…perhaps partially devastated by the 2008 floods but apparently rebounding fine. Where there are people, there will be livestock and dogs, generally speaking.
Yes, it is good to do research. But it is also unfortunate that Friends of Animals seems to blatantly dismiss the reality that animals are there in Haiti, that they were there before the earthquake, and that they will be there after. My gut response to FoA’s release is that it has more to do with the politics of the animal rights movement (and some of the divisiveness) and less to do with the reality that there are animals in need of aid in Haiti. The other truth is that there are folks from these organizations heading out to Haiti to offer assistance and aid to the animals. CVM and Sodepraco (sp) are already on the ground helping animals. SO we know there’s a need.
The big question is how well the funds are managed. That’s always a concern. And yes, another valid concern is how likely rescuers are to find animals in need w/i a population of very hungry, desperate people. I do not doubt that many farmed animals have already been slaughtered to feed the people there.
fwiw, Kinship Circle included three photos of stray Haitian dogs, post-quake, in its latest alert. The photos are from the Washington Post & the LA Times.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4289164919/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4289907688/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4289165069/
Kelly: I agree with your comments on contradictory statements when she argues that we should help both nonhuman and human animals but recommends human-only relief groups. Intersectionality in our movement is needed, but we shouldn’t allow this to lapse into anthropocentrism. Thanks for providing those helpful links showing evidence of stray dogs in Haiti.
Marji: I agree, the article is probably due, in part, to the politics of the movement. I think a local Haitian organization would be best suited to rescuing nonhuman animals, I just don’t know which groups are available. Maybe the larger groups will direct funds to them, they should say so if this is the case.
If I had money to donate, I would give it to Food for Life Global (http://www.ffl.org/). Here’s why:
The animals enslaved for food can’t really be rescued, as it would just be serving them up to be slaughtered and eaten. The animals kept as “pets” that survived will probably be slaughtered and eaten if humans continue to starve without food. Any free-living nonhuman animals will probably be hunted down, slaughtered, and eaten as well. It seems vegan food donations, such as those from Food For Life Global would do the most good for humans and other animals.
Update: According to In Defense of Animals (IDA), ARCH is working in coordination with Dominican Republic-group Sociedad Dominicana para la Prevención de Crueldad a los Animales (SODOPRECA): http://www.idablog.org/featured/idas-haitian-efforts-begin/. Visiting SODOPRECA’s website (http://www.sodopreca.com/), you see them mention ARCH and say that they refused to sign a contract with them. In sum, it seems that a direct donation to SODOPRECA makes more sense than contributing to ARCH, which may or may not be doing anything.
Kelly, I’ve just been informed by someone on another forum that one of the photos from the Kinship Circle email in your post (http://www.easyvegan.info/2010/01/14/haiti/ ) was actually taken in November 2003 (see left most picture, middle column): http://www.language-works.com/Haitidogs/photos.htm
I assume the other photos (such as those from Washington Post and LA Times) are from 2010, post-earthquake, but passing old photos off as new ones strains the credibility of the groups who are raising money to supposedly help nonhuman animals in Haiti.
I should have asked before jumping to conclusion: was this photo included in the email from Kinship Circle or did you add it to the post?
Brandon – The first three photos in my post (the Haitian children, the donuts, and the white dog) are just random CC photos I pulled from Flickr. All the others – the ones which appear within the the text of the forwarded Kinship Circle alerts – were included in the original emails from KC.
Re: the KC alerts – the animal-themed photos appearing in the first two alerts from 1/14 and 1/15, i.e.,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4275678090/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4277585293/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4277585305/
are credited to the appropriate websites at the bottom of the alerts. Perhaps KC could have more clearly identified them as pre-quake, but they certainly didn’t try to pass them off as post-quake, either. I think they just wanted to get the alert out and needed some photos for decoration (whereas no post-quake animal photos were yet available in the news media).
Also in the earliest two alerts, KC includes one “doctored” photo, which is clearly labeled as such:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4274933075/
And two recent news photos of the rubble and a search and rescue (?) dog:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4274933109/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4274933137/
It’s only the photos in the 1/19 alert which were taken post-quake. These are dated and credited to the appropriate news agencies.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4289164919/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4289907688/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4289165069/
Hope this helps! Perhaps I’ll add my own captions to the photos in the KC alerts to more clearly identify them.
Thanks for the info, Brandon. A reader at my place also mentioned SODOPRECA’s statement, the content of which seems cause for concern. I just wish SODOPRECA would go into greater detail re: the contract specifics. Then again, I’m sure they have bigger problems to deal with.
For the time being, I think your plan (donate to SODOPRECA or FFL) makes the most sense. I, too, have been looking for additional local/Haitian animal rescue groups, with little luck. Let me know if you come across anything!