From The Field- By Elizabeth Davison, Executive Director – April 30, 2013
This week the Naples office was honored to participate in Rotary International’s Group Study Exchange, a program that provides cultural and vocational opportunity for young business professionals to be paired with Rotary districts in different countries.
When local businessman and Pelican Bay Rotarian Jim Rice (and longtime supporter of Hope for Haiti) asked us to host Mayvis Gibus for a day, we gladly accepted. Mayvis is from Martinique, studied in France and holds a Masters in Business Administration and International Relations. She is an Economic Affairs and Development Officer with an NGO in Martinique which has initiated co-operation projects with Haiti in the framework of the reconstruction after their 2010 earthquake.
For the past month we talked about how we would share our knowledge and processes with our visitor and looked forward to learning from her also. Our plan was to have each member of our staff spend an hour with Mayvis and explain exactly how they accomplish their goals while also reviewing their job responsibilities.
Photo L-R – Michael Sherman, Mayvis Gibus, Elizabeth Davison, Yvette Ebb, Cathy Grassi, Ida Soderlind, Stephanie Jepsen.
Mayvis spent the first hour with me and I was honored to also have her Rotarian host Tim spend that hour with us. I gave a PowerPoint overview of what Hope for Haiti accomplishes each year and ended the hour with a 10 minute video which depicted scenes from a recent visit to Haiti by Bob and Renee Parsons of GoDaddy.com and The Bob and Renee Parsons Foundation. They are our largest donors and have made 2 trips (they call them fact finding missions) to Haiti to see how our programs are progressing. It was so rewarding to hear Tim and Mayvis marvel at the amount of work we do and the fact that we are touching over 500,000 Haitians each year through our mission to improve the quality of life for the Haitian people, particularly children, through education, nutrition and healthcare.
Operations Director Cathy Grassi spent her hour going over the process of receiving in-kind donations, logging, packing and palletizing in preparation for shipment to Miami and then into container ships bound for Haiti. Stephanie Jepsen, Director of Development, shared her expertise in overseeing all the fundraising activities for the organization as well as events and grant research. Michael Sherman, Development Analyst and IT Specialist, went through the intricacies of our enterprise data system- this really fascinated Mayvis. Yvette Ebb, Office Manager and Ida Soderlind, Executive Assistant, explained about the many duties that go into the smooth running of the office.
It was a delight to take Mayvis to lunch at our favorite neighborhood pizza café accompanied by volunteer Pat McGloin who helped me explain how we couldn’t accomplish all we do without the support of our many volunteers.
It was wonderful to help Mayvis achieve her goal of this trip which was to “share great human experiences based on friendship, brotherhood and good will as well as widening her perspectives and improve her working skills and competencies.” We’ve invited lovely Mayvis Gibus to come back and spend a day with us anytime. She also invited us to come to Martinique for a visit. We are all packing our bags! Thank you Mayvis.