Impact!

• From 1997 through 2024, we have delivered 314,841 Couple Years of Protection (CYPs), the internationally accepted metric by which USAID measures family planning achievement.
• We did this by serving more than 81,680 rural and low-income urban (barrio) women and their families, an estimated (at least) 300,000 beneficiaries.
• We have also delivered 5,293 Educational Workshops on Sexual and Reproductive Health to over 126,510 adults, students, teenagers, and public service and education personnel.
• We have done all of this on an average family planning budget of about $207,000 a year, at an average cost of less than $12 per CYP over the last 10 years.
• The enormous and unsatisfied demand for family planning and reproductive health services in our area still far exceeds our current funding and capacity to provide, but we have infrastructure in place and are ready and eager to expand our services with your support!

• We fund 50+ scholarships a year encouraging remote rural students to finish high school.
• More than 500 rural students have attended high school, where previously, they would have abandoned their education at or before the sixth grade.
• More than 100 have graduated from high school and at any given time, some 15 selected low-income graduates are attending local colleges with our support.
• Our Rural Education Center, several walking hours into the river valley, offers computers, library facilities, and tutoring for valley primary, high school, and college students.
• Several outlets for subsidized school supplies – for preschool, primary, and high school students – are run by students and their mothers out of local rural homes.
• Popular access to computers and Internet is available for low-income students and community activists at our urban cyber center.
• Over the years, we have helped to construct and maintain a rural kindergarten, a rural child care center, several rural school libraries, and a rural school cafeteria to accommodate the government’s school lunch program.
• We help with baseball, soccer, and other sports activities to help students stay creatively engaged when not in school!

Over the years, projects in the remote river valley where we live and work include:

• Installation and maintenance of gravity-piped potable water for 120+ valley families.
• Installation of solar energy electricity for 25+ valley casas, the local church, and the school complex.
• Support for other infrastructure in our rural community, such as maintaining the bridge, trails, and remote schools.
• Periodic vaccination campaigns against paralytic rabies and encephalitis for hundreds of burros, mules, and other domestic animals.
• Distribution of Durian, Mangosteen, Jackfruit, Rollinia, Carambola, and other little-known tropical fruit cultivars to farmers and Venezuelan agriculture institutions. Some of our originally distributed seedlings are now producing fruit and seed themselves, as the distribution process multiplies on its own.
• Expanding tree farming with unusual tropical fruits is an economically viable way to rebuild the deforested landscapes of rural Venezuela and provide local farmers with new revenue streams. Tree permaculture conserves the tropical environment and ameliorates climate warming.
• Our Community Center, located where the valley meets the road, served for ten years as a base for school and community meetings, for government-subsidized food distribution, to store agricultural products in transit to the Cumaná market, to store building supplies and school equipment brought from town for Brito valley projects, and as a care station for the community’s pack animals. Now in private local hands, it continues to offer many of these same functions.

Some doctors and partners have called us the “Doctors Without Borders” within the state of Sucre!

• Through 2024, we have performed 18,353 surgical procedures, including tubal sterilizations, vasectomies, hernia repairs, and various gynecological, orthopedic, oncological, pediatric, and ENT interventions, some requiring hospitalization.
• We have also cumulatively offered 24,227 medical consultations in reproductive health and other primary health care.
• Plus 6,273 Medical Follow-ups, including laparoscopic diagnosis, lab work, imaging, medicine, eyeglasses, nutrition, biopsies, and treatments.
• The enormous and unsatisfied demand for health care in our area far exceeds our current funding and capacity to provide, but we have significant infrastructure and personnel in place and are ready and eager to expand our services with your support.