Today marks HRI’s 10th anniversary of saving lives! While this is a wonderful milestone for our organization, it is a sobering time for the world!

Incredibly, ten years ago, just months before HRI became fully operational, Haiti faced the deadliest earthquake in the country’s history! In fact, HRI was founded in part to facilitate a long-term response to that catastrophic event and the overwhelming needs it created in a country plagued by poverty, hunger, political instability, and both natural and manmade disasters.

Over the past 10 years, HRI’s work in Haiti has grown significantly in multiple sectors – orphanage support, community work with extremely poor families and children, child protection, the prevention of abandonment and trafficking. This growth has enabled us today, thanks to a great professional team, to be on the frontlines of the worst pandemic in our world’s recent history. HRI is reaching those in greatest need during their time of greatest need – an infectious disease with the potential to ravage the nation!

Guatemala, notorious for having the 4th highest rate of chronic malnutrition among children under the age of 5 in rural areas worldwide, is now facing an entirely new set of problems! Over the past 10 years, HRI has matured in our programming. We have gone from a straightforward strategy of providing food and nutritional support to the adoption of a more complex strategic approach to improving child outcomes via diverse pathways, i.e. safe cookstoves, clean water, sanitation, etc. Today, as we face massive food rationing, the challenge to farmers to plant their crops, and the fear of infection across that country, HRI’s outstanding team is on the frontlines responding in real-time to the real needs faced by a nation!

My greatest hope is that in 10 years time I am sitting here and writing to all of you to say thank you – all of the needs have been met, all of the children are healthy, every child is attending school, every parent is equipped to care for their children, not one child faces the danger of being trafficked or abandoned, and that there is no food insecurity in our world! It will be then and only then that we will have fully accomplished our mission.

Until that time, I THANK YOU for giving, going, praying, and promoting HRI where you are and around the globe.

Here’s to the next 10 years!

Rachel Zelon
CEO & President

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