December 7, 2010

How to Help Haiti

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/savethechildrenusa/4321945081/in/photostream/">Save the Children</a>/Flickr

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Read human rights reporter Mac McClelland’s dispatch from Haiti, or see the full Mother Jones special report on Haiti’s reconstruction.

Since I live-tweeted about my day with a rape survivor in Haiti and ran this story about a displacement camp in Port-au-Prince—and now, additionally, there’s the cholera crisis—we’ve gotten a LOT of letters from people who want to know who’s making a difference in the beleaguered country. This info will appear as a handy sidebar in the January issue of Mother Jones, but in the meantime, here are some groups doing great on-the-ground work—plus a bonus charity involving underpants.

KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims) and FAVILEK (Women Victims Get Up Stand Up)
Founded and run by Haitian rape survivors, both of these organizations assist victims with medical, legal, and moral support, in addition to building a movement against sexual violence. Visit them here and (through an American partner) here, respectively. 

Partners in Health
The group cofounded by American superdoctor Paul Farmer has been battling health care problems in Haiti since 1987, and now it’s at the forefront of the cholera response. The J/P Haitian Relief Organization, Sean Penn’s charity, is also teaming up with PIH to tackle the disease.

KONPAY (Working Together for Haiti)
Provides assistance and support to grassroots environmental, women’s, and human-rights groups. Since the quake, KONPAY has also fought to get Haitian voices included in foreign-run relief and reconstruction meetings. konpay.org.

Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti
In addition to providing legal support to Haitians and creating a force of Haitian human-rights lawyers and advocates with its partner, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, Boston-based IJDH publishes extensive reports that keep a light on conditions in the displacement camps.

PACT
Somebody gave me a pair of this company’s organic man-panties recently, so I can personally attest to their awesomeness. But more important, every pair you order from the Winter Lights collection gets a solar-powered lantern donated to a displaced woman or family in Haiti.  

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The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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