Did Your Haiti Donations Ever Get Spent?

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Why yes, according to a new report by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, most of them did. Since the earthquake that devastated the country nearly two years ago, two-thirds of the $2.1 billion aid organizations have collected has gone to rebuilding or otherwise helping Haiti. That’s a significant improvement over what the Chronicle found six months after the quake, when less than half the money had been utilized.

Not that two-thirds of the work is finished, however. “There are still 500,000 people in camps, there’s still a very broken health system, and there’s still endemic cholera and very little access to water and sanitation,” says one NGO director interviewed for the survey. Though there are substantial millions remaining, it’s not enough to get everything on aid groups’ wishlists done—or to handle something like a full-blown cholera crisis. Since donations have tapered way off after the initial postquake fundraising bonanza, some groups are still offering encouragement to would-be donors. “It’s not hopeless,” Food for the Poor executive director Angel Aloma tells the Chronicle, “it’s just slow.”

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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