For sure we for sure have to stand-up and scream that the first measurement of a nonprofit is its outcomes, not its CEO’s salary!

We need a national assessment apparatus that can do four things: 1) provide rich narrative, video and survey information, 2) update it on an annual basis, 3) provide it for a meaningful fraction of the 1.1 million nonprofits out there and 4) do it inside a user interface that makes people want to spend time there. None of this will be cheap. We keep looking for cheap solutions. Instead, we should invest a meaningful fraction of the $300 billion given to charity each year in some analysis of what that money os doing, or trying to do. And as well intentioned as Charity navigator is, its $1 million annual budget isn’t close to what will be required.

I whole -heartedly agree with the sense of your article, and would like to engage with you and others with respect to foreshortening the typically too long construction/reconstruction interval.

With regard to Peter Freeman’s insightful remarks and call to action regarding better solutions for transitional shelters (i.e., not tents and slit trench latrines), I just returned from a planning meeting with SOS International in Santo Domingo, whence they are coordinating international inflow in support of their Children’s Villages in Haiti. SOS has decided to rapidly expand their existing villages using what many believe will prove to be a paradigm-changing form of transitional shelters. These units are pre-fabricated, easily transported and can be assembled using local labor and minimal hand tools. They are rigid walled, impermeable, easy to keep clean and non-toxic. They are a far better solution than tents, especially where large numbers of people must be housed for a period of 1-3 years, pending a more permanent solution. The shelters themselves have a service life in excess of 5 years.

I would be happy to email additional details if this is of interest.

Best regards,

Bob Bellhouse

I am copying below an email I sent to a friend and colleague, Lou Lucke, who is coordinating USA’s emergency food and other assistance at present in Port au Prince regarding what must be accomplished in the next 6 months to set up live-able tent cities that contain the elements of future permanent communities that are indeed better.

Ambassador Louis Lucke
Port au Prince

Hi Lou.

Am I glad to see you involved! (per Washington Post article today Jan. 31). I have been fretting about what happens after the emergency health and nutrition needs are addressed.

I was in the DR many years ago(mid 60’s) workng with the O.A.S. when a hurricane destroyed many houses in a community in the southwest of the country. Reconstruction was a disaster too. The money was wasted on a handful of nice middle class homes. They could have made the same financial support and materials available to hundreds of families for each to build one hardened core structure..bathroom and adjoining storage area for instance.. and then in a second phase provide the families with materials, design and help to add on to the core structure, using their own labor and according to their needs and the site characteristics.

I would like to offer some suggestions about the work that must follow the urgent survival support actions you are coordinating…namely the creation of liveable, temporary tent cities before the rains and the hurricane season set in, that is between now and July or August. These tent cities are likely to be inhabited for a least a year and probably two years, given the imperative to reconstruct homes and buildings so that they are resistant to earthquakes as well as hurricanes.

Reconstruction will take several years in Port au Prince and other cities with major destruction.

Rebuilt structures and neighborhoods need to be hurricane proof to the extent feasible and resistant to earthquakes. Reconstruction needs to be be preceded by planning and infrastructure for sustainable, efficient, live-able urban livelihoods.

We need to embed green technologies into the reconstruction process: Solar energy capture and energy conservation. Photovoltaics, water heating, external move-able louvers to shade building facades, building design that facilitates cooling via air flow. Rain water capture from roof tops and cisterns. Grey water diversion to nearby agricultural fields or gardens. Recycling of urban organic wastes (excepting human and hospital wastes). Recycling and/or reuse of metals, plastics, cardboard, etc. etc. There is much we have learned. Pathways for pedestrians and bicycles apart from roadways. Parks. Playgrounds.

Petionville and other such unplanned communities probably did not have a sewerage system. These should be built along with an improved potable water treatment and distribution system. And storm sewers.

Reconstrcution along these lines will take several years to plan, organize and implement. We cannot accept or support the reconstruction of slums.

Meanwhile in the tent cities, there will be a need to provide for shelter in case of severe weather and hurricanes. Tents will not withstand hurricanes. They can shelter from heavy rains but not high winds. With luck there will only be rains. Of course, tents will need platforms to raise them above the ground during the rainy season and tent cities must have storm water evacuation in place…a system of ditches at the minimum.

My suggestion is to build hurricane proof facilities in the tent cities using modular construction methods. In case of a severe storm or hurricane people could take refuge in these structures. They could include primary schools, primary health care facilities, storage facilities, structures that house community administrative work and meeting rooms/places of worship, community washing and bathing facilities, community latrines. These structures will facilitate the provision of needed community services and governance. They should be equipped with the green technologies listed above. These structures should be designed to be dis-assembled and moved to a permanent location in the communities and areas that are to be re-built once the infrastructure is ready.

The tent cities will need the different functions of these modular structures, just as will the eventually reconstructed neighborhoods which could ‘inherit’ them. They would provide the displaced, homeless dwellers of the tent cities with a tangible bridge to the future.

Who can design and spec out these structures?

I couldn’t find much online about modular construction using Google.

Architects for Humanity was already working in Haiti on a few structures. I would send an appeal for suggestions and assistance to them as well as faculties of architecture and architects associations in the USA, Puerto Rico, and Central America.

The US building industry is in a slump,notably in Florida. They should be challenged to come up with designs and methods to use both US and Haitian talent, materials, labor. Modules could be built in Haiti.

Participants in the annual Department of Energy’s Solar Decathalon should be contacted. One entry from Texas in last summer’s decathalon focused on using local materials suited to the Gulf Coast climate.

An online planning process should begin ASAP to establish the specifications for the different kinds of modular structures. Identify a lead entity for each kind of structure. For instance for neighborhood primary care facilities get Medicins sans Frontiers involved in establishing specs. Neighborhood Primary care facilities would include pediatric as well as adult women and men care, treatment of basic illnesses and simple wounds, basic diagnostics and dispensing of medicine. Requirements for exam rooms, provider offices, waiting/reception rooms, power, water, waste disposal, storage, etc. Preference for green technologies.

Human waste could be dealt with using the clivus multrum composting toilet technology that the US and State park services have installed in various locations, including on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, not far from where we live. (Clivus multrum is a Swedish invention by the way). And there is the successful use in India of treating human waste in bio-digesters that generate methane gas for cooking and yield, eventually, excellent compost.

Let me know if and/or how I might be able to advance these ideas. My hope is that better minds than mine have already figured this out and it’s already underway.

All the best to you and and Joy and may your work be blessed,

Peter

Since there is a vested interest in the students succeeding, Sudex will offer low interest startup business loans (contingent upon its own resources), using limited ownership of the business as collateral which decreases as the loan is paid off. The interest is hoped to help provide loans to other ventures and so through both the education and business loan initiatives, a geometric scaling up will occur (theoreically at least). While some agreements have been entered into on the a basis of trust and mutual respect, there is no track record yet, and of course no one single strategy will be sufficient.

It seems to me that we tend to forget the magnitude of the numbers we are talking about. You read on the different websites of those cited above and others, the impressive numbers they have reached, which collectively may be in the hundred’s of millions, which could optimisticly be 15% of those in need, but as pointed out this may be no more than raising income to above extreme poverty levels without any substantive change, scaliblity or sustainability. And the reputedly the number of the those in need may well be increasing at the same rate, so that the net gain is zero.

It can be frustrating, but I think we need to stop thinking there is only one correct way–my way, but to work collaboratively from the top, the bottom and sideways in a coordinated concentrated effort to reach as many in need as possible, give them the strength to carry on, and then get out of the way. Wish it were that simple and not too sure it is not.