Keep the Toilets Open! Emergency Appeal
Dear Friends,
Six years ago, SOIL was a small organization building toilets throughout northern Haiti whenever our friends and family could wire us a few dollars. Month by month we slowly expanded the use of ecological sanitation around the country and grew the size of our composting waste treatment piles, but we lived with the deep-set uncertainty of not knowing if we’d have enough money to keep buying construction materials.
Today, thankfully, our reality is very different. Even though we still deal with the financial rollercoaster of non-profit work, SOIL has the largest ecological sanitation program in the country, more than 10,000 people are accessing SOIL’s public EcoSan toilets, people from around the world are using SOIL’s educational materials to spread the use of EcoSan throughout Haiti and internationally, and we are preparing to embark on a revolutionary new initiative to start a social business providing household sanitation in Haiti’s urban slums.
Just as we did six years ago, we face the challenge of operating on a shoestring budget with every spare penny already allocated for paying public toilet managers, purchasing tools or building more compost bins. And today, we are writing to ask you for your help yet again because we are facing a cash flow emergency. SOIL recently won several prestigious awards and grants and we expect the checks to arrive soon. But they haven’t arrived yet and we have only $583.20 in our Port-au-Prince bank account and $378.55 in our Cap-Haitien bank account.
Dear friends, we ask all of you who have sent us $50 before, all of you who have watched our progress but not yet donated, and all of you who have generously supported us over all these years to send $5, $10, $100. Whatever you can send. Whatever you can spare. This is a special opportunity to support a impactful project with minimal overhead in a particularly momentous occasion. We are trying to raise $10,000 by August 15th so that we can stay in operation until our next grant check arrives. Please take 3 minutes to contribute today using the donation form to the right or by sending your tax-deductible contribution to SOIL at 124 Church Rd, Sherburne, NY 13460.
Drums from SOIL toilets lined up waiting for pickup and replacement from the SOIL Poopmobile at the Dotwa camp in Port-au-Prince, home to over 1,500 people displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Photo credit: Vic Hinterlang
Sincerely,
Leah, Sasha, Bobo, Nick, Theo, Josaphat, Chantal, Dodo, Jean-Marie, Monika, Molly and the rest of the folks at SOIL
Linda Adams
August 9, 2012 (1:12 pm)
Keep up the good works… God bless you all
Thank you
Leah Page
August 16, 2012 (4:07 pm)
We did it! Over $10,000 raised from more than 100 people around the world. Thanks to you SOIL’s public toilets will continue to provide critical sanitation services to thousands of people in Haiti and we’ll keep moving towards our goal of developing innovative sanitation solutions that will support longterm reconstruction goals in Haiti. 100% sanitation or bust!