Haiti Outreach started in 1997 with a few Minnesota volunteers who had been to Haiti with other organizations participating in minor projects on the ground. They met at St. Luke Presbyterian Church in Minnetonka after their travels and dreamed about doing something more impactful, something that would make a bigger difference to help Haiti become a truly developed country. They expressed being inspired by Neil Van Dine, an American who moved to Haiti in 1989 in his 20s and has never left, committing his life’s work to assisting the people of Haiti.

Prior to meeting members of the Minnesota group, Neil worked for some years in Haiti with Jay Lawhon, a retired entrepreneur, businessman, and philanthropist from Arkansas. They drilled many wells together, bringing clean water to thousands of people on the Central Plateau of Haiti. But Neil saw that just drilling wells was not enough.

Although many more people had clean water, they were not very involved in the creation of the wells and took little ownership and responsibility for their repair and maintenance. He saw almost 100% of the wells were either broken or contaminated after 2 years. Haitians waited for NGOs to come fix them as they went back to getting water from streams and rivers, that were often contaminated as well. If this was going to change, if the people of Haiti were to become less dependent on others and acquire the skills to take responsibility for their own conditions, then there needed to be new ways of working with the people to bring social change. From this experience, Neil vowed to create clean water systems where the people in Haiti would become responsible for their repair and maintenance, not making them dependent on foreign aid.

The Minnesota group saw Neil’s new mission as a worthwhile endeavor, since clean water is a universal human need, and the country was strewn with broken wells. Something had to change. So they formed Haiti Outreach as a 501(c)3 and generated the following guiding principles:

• Our Vision is for Haiti to become a developed country, with sufficient clean water, food, shelter, sanitation, medical care, and educational and economic opportunity for everyone.

• Our mission is to collaborate with the people of Haiti to build and maintain community-initiated projects that advance their development.

In time, they developed a revolutionary four-point model of community development that included community desire and participation, community responsibility, and a transparent economically based maintenance program. For Haiti to become a developed country, projects needed to be more than just temporary relief, supported from outside the country. Programs needed to be community-led and developed so that the people themselves would become responsible for their own sustainability.

Since our start, we have created clean water wells and water systems for over 272,000 people! More recently, we have helped with more complex town water systems and have created the first pressurized system in Haiti that operates 24/7! Funds collected from newly installed meters based on usage are collected monthly for transparent system management and maintenance.

Haiti Outreach has spread this work to various parts of the country, and incorporated local and national government officials, as well as the national potable water and sanitation agency DINEPA. They have also shared their model with other NGOs in Haiti, and with the Rotary based HANWASH non-profit organization in particular, which has partnered with Haiti Outreach on several on-going community managed clean water and sanitation programs.