How we work
Three principles, applied the same way every time
Owned locally
A project belongs to the community that lives with it. Our role is to start it, guide it and step back. If it only works while we are there, it does not work.
Built to last without us
Cooperatives, irrigation, trade schools, access to banking. Infrastructure and skills rather than distributions, because a distribution ends the day it stops.
Environmentally honest
Self-sufficiency that exhausts the land is a delay, not a solution. Water, waste and soil are part of every plan we support.
Honduras · 2020-2022
The Santa Cruz project
In the department of El Paraíso, the community set three goals with us: end extreme poverty in Santa Cruz, create local employment, raise literacy. Around those goals we supported a food cooperative, farmland under a five-year plan, an irrigation system, a trade school, access to banking, better water distribution and health care.
The program is suspended today. A change of national administration in Honduras altered the operating conditions the project depended on, and we chose to pause rather than run a program we could not run properly.
Where we stand
An honest status, not a campaign
Our Honduras programs, including Santa Cruz, are suspended. Following a change of national administration, the institutional conditions our work depended on are no longer in place. Pausing was our own decision, taken so that the community would not be left with a program we could no longer support properly.
For Better Community USA remains active as a legal entity, maintains its filings and its board, and holds the record of what was built. When a new program opens, it will appear here with its dates.
Field operations in Cuba are carried by For Better Community Canada, a separate legal entity with its own board and its own accounts.
"To be sustainable, this project needs to be owned by Santa Cruz citizens. Our role is to instigate, assist and facilitate."
Santa Cruz project plan, 2020