Haiti Solar Oven Partners Director Rick Jost announces that gifts totaling $6,000 will be used as a matching challenge to other HSOP supporters. 

A group of anonymous donors have the challenged HSOP supporters to fund an associate director position and to complete the $6,000 match by June 1, 2014. “We’d like have funding in place to share the good news and the position announcement at Annual Conference June 5-7 in Rapid City, SD,” Jost says.

Photo:  Alan Stearns (Canton UMC)  and Marty Toepke-Floyd (Napoleon-Lehr UMC) assemble an oven frame as school children watch and wonder. Oven components are prepared in the Dakotas and shipped via sea container to Port au Prince, Haiti. Our Haitian staff monitors the difficult task of getting the container safely stored until oven distribution and assembly by VIM teams and Haitian participants. Submitted photo.

Insistent requests for more ovens in Haiti combined with HSOP's realistic goals for growth will require additional staffing, say members of the Advisory Board. The associate director will share the significant increase in work load associated with distributing twice as many solar ovens annually—2280 in 2013. Jost explains that the associate director will also work on fundraising and grant writing essential in growing the program. 

From the simple workshop in Volga,SD to fabricating reflectors in Moffit, ND, and the making bread pans for inclusion with the ovens—all this expansion has expanded travel, administration and manufacturing time. 

To be part of this special matching challenge, designate gifts to "Haiti Solar Oven Partners" with a memo of "#670 Associate Director Match," and mail to Dakotas Conference Office, PO Box 460, Mitchell, SD 57301. 

If your business or place of employment offers matching gifts, consider presenting the HSOP Associate Director Match challenge. All gifts are tax deductible and will be gratefully acknowledged. 

"In light of the demand for and capacity to distribute solar ovens in Haiti, our goal must be no fewer than 2,300 solar ovens delivered to trained users annually," says Jost. 

“We’re like watching a sapling that has developed a good root system underground and now it’s ready to grow like crazy,"says another HSOP volunteer.