Food For The Poor

I am a certified fundraising professional and have great admiration for the staff and the work that Food For The Poor has accomplished the past 30 years, and continues to accomplish in the countries it serves! I have seen first hand their wonderful charitable work in Jamaica, Haiti and Honduras. FFP not only provides food and much needed supplies, but more importantly the staff strives to help those living in the countries become self-sufficient by teaching skills that will boost the families' incomes. They have certainly done an admirable job in helping rebuild Haiti after the terrible earthquake.This is truly a charity with a heart combined with good business and management skills of its leaders. Keep up the great mission!

I am an anthropology professor at an American university. For the past 13 years I have been assisting with development projects in a Jamaican community. Eight years ago we established a fisherman's cooperative. Food for the Poor immediately came to our assistance, providing us with a headquarters building, a cold storage facility, and four ocean-going boats, as well as building 100 homes for extremely poor families. In addition, they stationed a fisheries expert in the village, who built artificial reefs to attract fish. With their assistance we have become the foremost fisher's group on the island and a leading environmental organization as well. We recently secured land from government for a new preschool, and FFTP will be building a 2400 square foot concrete classroom to replace three board shacks that serve over 60 children. The only stipulation they have made is that a small portion of each catch from the donated boats be set aside for community development projects. I was skeptical of them at first, worried about their religious foundation, but there has been no proselytizing whatsoever. FFTP has been an excellent partner; I can't find fault with their operations on the ground.

In response to the post from March 30th by Judith Pecho:

Food For The Poor serves 15,000 hot meals six days a week at the location described by the activist writing the story. The recipients are people living nearby who have no income, and no other food resources. To receive food, people complete a simple form, which includes the number of people in their family. They bring a card with them each time and they are supplied simple, nutritious meals of rice, beans and basic stews. The people living at this camp would only have to walk across the street to obtain access to this food. In addition to this food, Food For The Poor distributes dried beans, rice, and other staples through 2,600 beneficiaries in Haiti. When intervening with direct distribution, security is a very real concern. Food For The Poor provided food to this camp immediately after the earthquake, but was forced to stop when those outside the camp make it too chaotic to continue the distribution. At that time, Food For The Poor chose to continue along its established path of supplying churches and associations who are structured for direct distribution. The camp residents were invited to come to the canteen and sign up for hot meals. Food For The Poor has been working in Haiti since 1986. The charity accelerated its work immediately after the quake and continues to work to rebuild Haiti. Immediately after the quake, Food For The Poor was supplying food, water and sanitation to the tent cities. Since the earthquake we have published on our website and in newspapers reports with details of the work we have accomplished in Haiti. As a matter of fact, The Chronicle of Philanthropy published a list of the 50+ organizations that had collected the most money for Haiti after the earthquake and what they had done in Haiti by the end of last year. We were #13, having collected more than $20 million for Haiti. The paper reported that we had spent all the money collected by the end of October. We were the only organization of the top 20 that had spent all the money that we had collected. The report made it clear that besides spending all the money, no one had built more permanent housing than Food For The Poor (1589 double unit structures), no one had dug more wells (more than 120) or more water projects (30 solar powered water purification/chlorination systems that purify 10,000 gallons of water per day (each) no matter the condition of the water source.) Food For The Poor was the organization that sent the most food, medicines and supplies into the country after the earthquake in 2010 (1,459 containers valued at more than $205 million). There are no members of the Mahfood family on the Board of Directors of Food For The Poor. Food For The Poor continues to work to rebuild Haiti. We encourage everyone to look at all the facts before they add to the chaos with misinformation.

Food For The Poor