Giving Compass' Take:

• Learn how your company can make meaningful and sustainable contributions to Haiti by supporting education, clean water initiatives, entrepreneurship, and women/girls partnerships. 

• How has corporate giving been unsuccessful in the past? Can we learn from those mistakes?

• Learn about these companies who are doing corporate activism right. 

We all want to help people, but misinformation and a lack of confidence in corporatized aid efforts sometimes deter us from doing so. The list of NGOs, fundraisers and activist groups out there could fill volumes, but when jumping into aid work from a corporate standpoint, it can be hard to know where to start.

People want to help, but most of us don’t know how best to get involved. Here are some ways your company can make a difference for Haiti and other places like it.

  • Education: Many Westerners have grown up with the concept of developing nations as hostile places where violence and unrest run rampant.Helping people come to know more about a country makes them fear it less, which removes barriers to involvement.
  • Work to Deliver Clean Water: Projects like Clean Water for Haiti are implementing sustainable solutions such as low-cost biosand filtering units that can be installed quickly and maintained with a minimum amount of training. These are important projects to support.
  • Paths to Entrepreneurship: Instead of donating free items, consider ways to partner with locals and encourage entrepreneurship. Instead of donating goods, which would hurt local markets, this approach puts the power of production in the hands of the people and allows them to take part in growing the local economy.
  • Support Women and Girls: Finding ways to partner with progressive women’s organizations can be doubly effective. Not only will you be making an immediate difference in people’s lives, but you will also be helping advance the broader, global movement toward better treatment of women.

Read more about how your company can help by Scott Huntington at TriplePundit.