Our Mission


Think globally. Act locally.

Transforming Lives:

Our in-country Mission is to improve the lives of the marginalized rural and urban barrio populations of northeastern Venezuela by offering family planning and reproductive health services, Rural education and literacy, rural livelihood and development, and humanitarian aid to help them emerge from centuries-long cycles of poverty exacerbated by Venezuela’s ongoing socio-economic crisis.

A Replicable Service Model:

Our larger Mission is to show that multi-sector community-based Population, Health, and Environment Initiatives (PHE) – such as our own Recipe for a Thriving Community – can be more effective than single-sector approaches and should be encouraged as development models for the less-developed world.

We are motivated by the win-win synergies which we see in our own work.
Attending to human needs and empowering women reduces population pressure on a fixed land base which reduces deforestation and erosion and allows the natural world to restore itself.
It starts with a base strategy of offering family planning services to vastly under-served communities:

  • Helping women control their own fertility with reproductive health programs that frees them from what can become a reproductive treadmill.
  • These smaller families can better subsist on limited resources, resulting in healthier children and mothers,
    which immediately improves the quality of their lives and families.
  • Which reduces pressure on beleaguered national and global public health care systems.
  • And reduces demographic pressures on the country’s institutions and the beleaguered environment.
  • This also frees and empowers women to focus on educating themselves and their children and building their communities.
  • As families and communities lift themselves out of survival mode, they can
    incorporate livelihood and sustainable agricultural alternatives which reduce deforestation and erosion – especially in vulnerable tropical forests.
  • This focus on sustainability improves vital access to clean water and utilities, amplifies the local food base, and enhances nutrition,
  • Working on all these fronts together demonstrably and quantifiably transforms lives in a replicable service model with enormous upside and applicability across the less-developed world.

We were originally inspired by the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo, Egypt in 1994, where visionary plans were forged to respond to the planet’s most pressing issues. This agenda evolved into the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015 and currently into the Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

“When we dream alone, it is only a dream.
When we dream with others, it is the beginning of reality.”
Dom Camera Helder

 

 

OUR RECIPE

FAMILY PLANNING

The first and crucial step towards empowering women is to offer them the means to control their own fertility.

EDUCATION

Once families gain control of their fertility, they can concentrate on giving their children the best possible future through schooling.

SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOOD

Our low-impact rural development and ecological agriculture initiatives serve a dual purpose – to preserve local ecosystems and promote self-employment for rural populations.

HUMANITARIAN AID

Venezuela is in crisis: its lower income people are tragically vulnerable to the lack of public services and widespread scarcity of even common medicines.

Watch our video!