Making Good Use of Donations - Haiti Project

In one of the comments to an earlier post, someone wondered how much money we made on our Haiti project. For a reference point, below is some information on the project, provided to me by the program director, Uma Viswanathan. For those of you that don't know, IAHV is the International Association for Human Values, a sister organization to the Art of Living Foundation, which plans and executes most of our service projects in the U.S.

With all that's happened in the U.S. with highly publicized cases where non-profits haven't made the best use of donations, it's not surprising that people can be doubtful. To get a broader sense of how the Art of Living has made use of funds, I'll invite Uma and others to share some of their experiences with service projects they have organized and run.


IAHV gets audited every year, and is an accredited charity of the Better Business Bureau and Best in America by Independent Charities of America. This means that donating to us gives people maximum bang for their buck.

• Donations collected to date: $165,000
  
• Donations spent to date: $54,000
• Remaining donation $ to be spent on TTC and operating expenses (mostly in-country)
• 96% of donations go directly into the service work and training of the youth leaders. (This is actually a conservative estimate)
• Number of team members giving 50% or more of their time to this project: 23
• Number of full-time (40+ hours/week) team members paid stipends: 3 (Stipend amount: $1000-$2000/month

Successes to date (since January 12 earthquake)2,332 AoL course graduates

• 5,130 Breath Water Sound course graduates
• 605 orphans and families trained to develop home gardens through permaculture
• Contract through the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN for 3 month pilot of our permaculture programs (who definitely did their due diligence on our organization before awarding the contract)
• 16 youth leaders undergoing training prep in: project management, budgeting, media and communications, community organizing