About
Our children of Promise - Haiti
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What is Our Children of Promise - Haiti? Our Children of Promise – Haiti is an ongoing, at-large social networking campaign to sustain full funding for the parochial school of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Gris-Gris, Haiti. This school strives to deliver an excellent experience for all of its pre-school, kindergarten, primary and secondary education students. The school also provides each student with a nutritious meal every school day.
This website is set up to mobilize support for St. Rose School with a broad based appeal for funding with very modest donations from a special group of about 300 patrons. We ask each to support the school - one child at a time and one school year at a time. A donation of $100 assures a place for a student at St. Rose School for an entire academic year. For many years our mission team members and parishioners have shared our Sister Parish experiences with others outside of our parish community, including friends, extended family, co-workers, and even strangers on flights to and from Haiti. Some of them have asked how they might support our Sister Parish relationship. This school funding campaign was developed to answer that question. We could have chosen to rely on a few benefactors, individuals and grant-giving foundations, for large donations, but the administrative cost of securing such funding is very difficult, often times requiring the paid services of specialists to prepare the funding requests and navigate the grant processes. Therefore we have chosen this more personal grassroots donor approach. Another very important purpose of this website is to be a resource for sharing information about the power and benefits of education in developing countries such as Haiti, to update patrons on improvements and achievements of St. Rose School, and to tell the stories of its teachers, students and their parents about the school and its impact on their lives and others. Who are Our Children of Promise? We believe every child is a child of promise when given the opportunity for a solid foundational education, moral guidance and the encouragement by teachers and parents for them to excel and become the best prepared for adulthood. Our Children of Promise are the students of St. Rose of Lima School. By providing outstanding early education we strive to prepare these new generations of adults for healthier and sustainable livelihoods and to be fuller practitioners of their Christian faith and Haitian citizenship. We believe that such adults will be active partners in creating a better Haiti. Is my donation paired with an individual student? No, because of administrative costs and security concerns for such an arrangement we choose not to do this. As a patron you will not get a picture of a student and there will never be correspondence between a patron and a student. With your co-patrons, you will participate in improving the lives and livelihoods of the entire student body for the academic year you support. You can also share in the achievements of the school and all its students through updates to this website with teachers’, students’ and their parents’ stories. You can make a difference! You have the opportunity to improve the lives and livelihoods of these students in a most constructive and sustainable way, by nurturing their minds, bodies and spirits to become fuller participants and contributors in building a better Haiti. But this is not a short term effort and it begins with the basics of clean water, safe shelter, sustainable farming and education. In the U.S. we take these basics for granted. In an underdeveloped and ravaged country such as Haiti, some of these basics are often only available through the goodwill of international aid from both government and non-government sources. History has taught us that these sources cannot always be relied upon to serve as a long-term underpinning for sustainable support, especially at a local level. The Church of the Risen Savior in Burnsville, MN, has taken a lesson from Mother Teresa, “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one.” As one parish community, Risen Savior has made a commitment to serve one other parish, St. Rose of Lima, which is hungry for a healthier and more sustainable existence and greater opportunity for its children. Over the past seventeen years our Sister Parish relationship has fostered significant positive changes in the lives of the people of Gris-Gris, Haiti, through a variety of projects and relationship missions. Perhaps the single most ambitious contribution to date is the School of St. Rose of Lima, which offers one of the greatest opportunities for the children it serves as well as their community and country which they will in turn serve as adults and leaders. Since Fall of 2007, the School of St. Rose has been operating in its new school building. It serves approximately 300 students in pre-school levels, kindergarten and grades 1 through 8. It is fully staffed by qualified teachers and administrators. In addition to academic instruction and moral guidance, the students are provided with one nutritious meal each school day. For some it is their only meal of the day. With a donation of just $100, you can be a Patron for one of Our Children of Promise students for a full academic year. |
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