International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region

I gave a pretty significant donation (4 or 5 figures US$) a few years ago. In the letter I sent with my donation, I was very clear that:
1) the donation was anonymous, and
2) I did not want a lot of hard copy mail telling me about their work. that I'd prefer to get info about their work from their web site and that they save printing /mailing costs to use for their programs.

Despite that, they are still sending me thick mailings of info. I emailed, called, and sent the stuff back saying "refused" and "take off your mailing list" I still keep getting fairly expensive mailings from them, even though I only gave that one time.

I hope they did better on my request for anonymity but I don't trust them for honoring or respecting donor's requests.

I honestly think that IPPF/WHR has it all. Great people, great mission and an environment that brings out the best in people. I think the work is critical and the managers understand working hard and having a life outside the office. Another important thing that this organization has or has infused in their culture is the need to want to be better. I think this is critically important because they will never stop fighting for women, children, and families.

La labor impulsada por IPPF en Latinoamérica es de gran importancia en el desarrollo social, principalmente en el reconocimiento y ejercicio de los derechos de las mujeres, en la participación conjunta de la pareja en la planificación de la familia y en el establecimiento de servicios médicos de calidad. En mi opinión, la institución está conformada por personas con altos valores éticos y comprometidos con la labor que desarrollan.

Is one of the few organizations dedicated to building institutional capacity while also supporting client services in sexual and reproductive health. Their work in clinical systems and application of meaningful use of clinical data is transforming decision support systems in the clnics of Latin American affiliates. This is indicative of a forward lookiing organization that places great value on efficint high quality health care for all women, regardless of economic level.

I am a retired OB/GYN. For more than thirty years I had a private practice that served women with insurance and medicaid. I worked for Planned Parenthood in several different roles, as a volunteer while a student, as a board member when I was a doctor, and as a medical director near the end of my career. There are many women who do not have access to health care because they are not on medicaid and they do not have insurance. There are also younger women who do not have access because of fear and ignorance. Planned Parenthood is the only organization that reaches out to all women, rich and poor, young and old, educated and illiterate. All are served.

Planned Parenthood is a critical safety net for the growing number of American women who cannot afford medical insurance and who are challenged by often raising their children on their own without the funds to even put food on the table let alone manage their own critical healthcare. I am glad that more information about the pivotal role they play is being understood and welcomed by a growing number of Americans, squelching the militant agenda of anti-Planned Parenthood radical groups.

My experiences with IPPF/WHR have mostly been at elevated levels of global and regional policy discussions and programme review, but I have seen them work with people recognized and promoted from more grass roots activities and recognize and value their various contributions and how they model responsible and, at times, courageous behavior that advances women’s welfare. I have had the pleasure of working with members of the organization for over a decade, most intensively during the period five to seven years ago, and treasure their dedication and focus.
IPPF/WHR seeks to improve the sexual and reproductive health of women, and men, throughout the hemisphere and the world. Talented people devote themselves to providing access to quality services at the local level, fostering closer relations and effective partnerships with champions and pioneers at community and national levels and working tirelessly to see that policy makers value women’s needs and opportunities. They champion a respectful human rights perspective to empower women in all aspects of their lives and give special attention to poor and neglected community members, most particularly to young people, whose perspectives they fully respect and reinforce. They help give voice to the unheard. They do their work even in inhospitable settings, where cultural and religious traditions constrain opportunities and choices.
I have attended regional meetings and seen vivid exchanges by members on how to improve relations with community members, how to use courts and human rights bodies to improve access to health services and how to improve the accountability of governments to implement their pledges made at international conferences. I have had the pleasure of following their publications and communications, which engage readers and provide them with evidence and information they need. I have seen several extraordinary young women advance through the organization (and sometimes move out into significant positions outside) after demonstrating their effectiveness locally. They are an inspiration to all of us in the field. Latin America is a model to the world on how women can mobilize to demand and obtain their rights, including to access to resources and health services and to freedom from gender-based violence. IPPF/WHR has been a tireless actor and engaged partner, with many others, working to make continued progress a reality.

IPPF/WHR is a strong organization, which delivers excellent sexual and reproductive health serivces across the Americas and the Caribbean. As the Regional Office of the broader International Planned Parenthood Federation, this organization provides excellent support to its member organizations, and through these members organizations provides exceptional services to the young people, women and families who need it most. Accoutability and transparency are key values for this organization, and are thus expected at all levels including governance, regional office, and member organizations.

IPPF/WHR does good work in the service and support it provides to its Member Associations in the region. But its New York office is a mess when it comes to management. It has a number of staff who take advantage of the "perks" and enjoy needlessly traveling around, spending donor money that could go to services. Meanwhile, middle-management and even younger staff take on all of the work, are forced to "manage-up" constantly and I know that moral is very low and. In some departments turn-over is very high but the senior management ignores this fact year after year.

IPPF/WHR is a very strong INGO dedicated to promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights in Latin America. Its staff, based in New York, is highly competent and committed to promoting free and informed choice, particularly among vulnerable groups such as adolescents and the poor. It has affiliates all over Latin America. It has a strong and well known Executive Director. In the past year it has made significant strides in the area of safe abortion.

When I was invited to join the Board I was happy to do it because I thought that IPPF reached out far and deep and I saw the opportunity to help women in a region that matters to me and to contribute to improve their living conditions and those of their families.
Since joining the Board, I have learned that what I thought about IPPF was real and I have seen it adopt new policies that would improve its performance and enhance the ability of its member organizations to provide services in their countries. It has an extraordinary leadership and its staff is excellent. In the hard economic times in which we live, it has streamlined its resources abut it continues to redouble its efforts to help communities like Haiti when necessary and to respond to the needs of its members. I am very proud and honored to be on the Board.

IPPF is an organization that has a huge heart. I know that everyone that volunteers is really proud to carry around the name. But I know there is a lot of great NGO´s that try to make people that suffer life´s better. IPPF not only thinks of human rights, but makes a difference in two great ways from my perspective. First, we are an organization that is really there, in the ground. Our Asocciate Members help woman, young girls and men in a daily basis and are crutial in terms of the need of the most needed. Our staff is basically what makes us big. And the second, is that IPPF looks ahead always. The fact that not only the "big" boards have 20% of young people making the global o regional directions, but also de national associations boards. Young people´s perspective are gatheres as hugely essential. That´s just the top of the iceberg: young people are engaged in advocacy and ground work in mainly every country IPPF works in, engaging not only into ours issues, but putting the word-and the heart- all around.
Clearly our structure-being a global federation- is our biggest strenght and probably our biggest weakness in terms of how difficult it is to really get money-focus-efforts-etc.. everywhere. I think that tecnology is a very good way of stregthening our IPPF network, making MA´s being able to comunicate with each other and work ahead together. Cultural differences don´t mean that the issues women and young women face around the world aren´t similar, therefore giving a huge importance to comunication around the network.

I have been associated with GRPA for the last 16 years. Only recently I worked with the Association to develop its new strategic plan 2010-2015. It is my opinion that the founders of this Association unknowingly opened a new era in the history of sexual and reproductive health in Guyana. And in so doing they laid the foundation upon which civil society’s response to public health challenges was built. They planted their footprints firmly on the sexual and reproductive health landscape in Guyana which previously was the domain of the Ministry of Health.
GRPA’s valiant efforts provided guidance and impetus to many non-governmental organisations that are now firmly entrenched within the national response to HIV and AIDS. GRPA has always placed great emphasis on family planning as evidence in its first objective, “Promote Sexual and Reproductive health including family planning through information, education and services.” GRPA has responded to the global public health issue - AIDS – having recognised the relationships between HIV and sexual and reproductive health.
GRPA should be commended for breaking new ground when it became the first NGO in Guyana to provide management and treatment for STIs. The Association has been supporting the efforts of the Government of Guyana to deliver STI management and treatment for sex workers and men who have sex with men through partnerships with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and NGOs that engage these groups with activities to achieve HIV prevention. The Association’s work has impacted the lives of countless Guyanese women, men, young people and families through the provision of quality and comprehensive SRH and HIV services. GRPA should be lauded for its work to intensify and scale up HIV prevention and to link HIV response to sexual and reproductive health. The Association’s new strategic plan provides a solid foundation upon which to build a sustainability plan, mobilise resources needed for implementation, and guide donor support.

I've been involved in helping to support a clinic that IPPF/WHR funded in Haiti. The Board was strategic in both making the grant and helping the organization on the ground to think about fundraising for the future.
In additition, the organization has great leadership. The executive director is a seasoned leader and she has recruited an excellent team.
IPPF/WHR is values driven and action oriented. Not afraid to take tough stands, to bring young people into the governance of the organization, and when need be, to kick out clinics that are doing their jobs.

The needs of the third world for aid seem, at times, to be hopelessly large. But if one looks back over the past 100 years, one notes that the developing nations that have achieved, or come close to, first world status have all accomplished this during periods of active family planning programs. There are sound reasons for these two processes to be linked. The cost of averting a birth has fallen to under $10 in recent decades. Each birth averted in the third world saves about $16,000 in infrastructure costs needed to accommodate each net birth. In a world with median earnings of $2/ day/ person these infrastructure costs translate into dire scarcities of financial capital - the cause of virtually all the ills we commonly associate with the third world. So those of us who want the third world to achieve the maximum possible benefit from each dollar of charitable giving could hardly do better than to donate to organizations like IPPF/WHR. Where else can the third world get a $16,000 benefit for each $10 we donate?
Bruce Sundquist
bsundquist1@windstream.net

I am a volunteer in PLAFAM (Venezuela), also Iam studing psichology in the Universidad Metropolitana. I am actually working in PLAFAM as agent of change in the subject of sexual reproduction in teens and adolescents in PETARE. This neighborhood is the biggest and more poor economically speaking town in Caracas, Venezuela. In this location we have problems like drugs, murders, sex abuses and ignorance. Actually we are working in a college with 9 persons that are compromised to this work of make new promoters of a concious sexual life. For that reasons we are improving our effords to make Venezuela a better place to live, more sensitive and human with knowledge, care and compromise. We are sure that PLAFAM is a NECESARY institution that fills a empty space in this matters in our country

I worked at a NEST/IPPF fundraiser selling IPPF tote bags, the profits of which went to NST artisans. I learned alot about the access to health care women were receiving in Central and South America as result of the IPPF's efforts, as well as the beneficial partnership between NEST and IPPF.

The NGO known as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), continues to be a highly respected global provider of sexual and reproductive as well as quality health care, with an amazing umbrella network of clinics and services in over 150 countries and millions of volunteers. The federation’s unquestionable commitment to health care Access, Adolescents, Advocacy, Abortion and in more recent times HIV/AIDS, allow its volunteers and staff to come into direct contact with the needs of humanity and especially the poor and underserved. Impressed with their work, I became a volunteer almost four decades ago.

The organization’s ongoing support for local member organizations is offered in a variety of forms including, training in health matters, administration, procedural guidance and all aspects of the management of a Non Governmental Organization This guidance has benefited the forty-one (41) member countries of the Western Hemisphere region including, small developing states like Barbados and the Caribbean Islands.

At a personal level, I have been proud to sit amongst other volunteers from this region and indeed the world body, to serve on its committees, share experiences and advise, and to be part of a variety of sustainable planning objectives, which continue to benefit those in need and those without a voice, in the important corridors of decision making especially in health and human rights matters.

International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region is an organization with over 50 years of experience and has remained on the cutting edge of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Latin America and across the world.

I have volunteered for IPPF since 2000, first within Canada at a local planned parenthood, then on our national board before joining the international governing body. The broad reach of IPPF that this represents is what makes the organization so successful at working to improve the health of individuals, families and communities through local interventions and global advocacy.

Last year, I had the opportunity to join the WestWind Foundation whose mission is to promote the protection of the environment and improve access to reproductive health care. Through this opportunity I was able to get on the ground experience with some of the reproductive health groups that I have an interest in. During the past few months I have had the chance to work with RHRP groups in several countries and the experiences have enhanced my awareness of the critically important need that organizations like International Planned Parenthood Federation

I am a staff member of IPPF/WHR and I am also a donor. My husband and I give personally to the organization that I work for because I have seen the work that IPPF/WHR is doing first-hand. The 40 Member Associations that make up the region are working in some of the hardest, most difficult areas of the Western Hemisphere where poverty, malnutrition and little or no opportunity for education combine to create suffering on a scale we often do not understand as Americans. IPPF/WHR is on the front-lines of the battle to break the cycle of desperate poverty by addressing a fundamental need for reproductive and sexual healthcare. In Colombia, for instance, where the world's second largest group of displaced persons reside (after only the Sudan) IPPF/WHR Member Association, Profamilia, is providing low-cost birth control, emergency contraception, Pap Smears, Vasectomy and Tubal Ligation and educating a new generation of young people through innovative programming designed to make them leaders in stopping violence and making good choices in life. I feel that my money, regardless of it pays for a pap smears, birth control or general healthcare is being invested in very directly alleviating the suffering (or potential suffering) of another human being(s) while also benefiting all of us and our planet. I'm proud to work for IPPF/WHR and even prouder still to be a donor.

I joined this Board, I believe, to strengthen one of the Five A's in its mandate, having worked in the field of HIV/AIDS, nationally, regionally and internationally for over twenty years.
The fact that the organization would seek to strengthen all areas was to me impressive and spoke to the fact that they were serious about meeting their strategic objectives.
Board meetings are serious, well-organized, in depth and are guided by a strong Chair, a knowledgable and interactivePresident and a most able and impressive Executive Director.
Meaningful attention is paid both to overarching goals and objectives but also to meeting the objectives at individual country levels, to include addressing the concerns of volunteers.
The Board represents a wide cross-section of skills including financial skills and the Secretariat has also managed to attract similar breadth of skills and remarkable commitment.