Medics HELP stands for Medics Helping Everywhere to Lessen Pain & suffering.
Mission:
Medics HELP is dedicated to providing continuous volunteer aid and relief work to communities in need within the developing world.
Our mission is to improve healthcare, education, community programs and orphan care within the developing world in order to help alleviate the pain and suffering associated with poverty, disease and illness. This mission is accomplished through the establishment of sustainable healthcare and community programs in areas of need.
How We Do It:
Our objectves are achieved in two major ways: We provide international deployments of volunteers to work side-by-side with locals in various ongoing healthcare, education and community projects. We also identify communities with the greatest need for improved healthcare and community programs and establish our own projects, including clinics and community centres.
The longer-term goal for all of our projects is self-sustainability. That is to foster an attitude of self-help within the communities we assist and develop programs that are eventually completely self-sustainable by those communities, so as not to promote a “welfare state of mind” where there is a continual, dependency on hand-outs and foreign aid.
More About Us:
Medics HELP is an upstart Canadian-based non-profit organization founded in 2007. Our founding members consist of several paramedics and other allied-health professionals as well as some non-medically-trained members. Medics HELP has no paid employees whatsoever. The entire organization is run by volunteers who donate their spare time to implement and manage our programs.
Almost all of the organization's founders work within the Canadian health system and in 2007, struck by the inequalities between the healthcare available in the developed world compared to that in the developing world, decided to offer their expertise and time in an effort to help make a difference and assist those in need overseas.
In researching ways to offer their assistance, the group of volunteers that would eventually form Medics HELP noticed a distinct lack of Canadian organizations able to send volunteers on relatively short-term assignements or rotating deployments overseas. Almost all of the large Canadian aid organizations required long-term commitments of 6 months to 1 year. Since all of the founding members must continue to work full-time in Canada in order to support themselves and their families, this was a significant barrier. Rather than giving-up on the idea however, the founders opted to start their own aid organization.
Initially Medics HELP will be focusing its efforts on Africa and will be working with partner agencies that already have infrastructure in place in order to place volunteers in areas of need. However, in the near future Medics HELP will be funding, building and staffing its own clinics and community centres within the developing world.
Our first deployment of volunteers was to Kenya in January 2009. Follow up trips will be ongoing with our next ones scheduled for spring and fall 2011 and our first clinic and community centre project tentatively scheduled to begin in 2012. This facility will serve as a model for our future projects throughout the developing world. Once built, the centre will be a huge boost to the local community, offering many beneficial programs in addition to providing for local healthcare needs. Please see the Kenya Clinic & Community Centre page for more information about this unique project. As Medics HELP prepares to launch this facility we will be seeking volunteers from Canada and elswhere around the world in order to help accomplish our goals. Qualified volunteers willing to make any time commitment, from as little as 2 weeks to more than a year, will be considered for our projects.
It's with dedicated volunteers, willing to give some of their time that Medics HELP plans on meeting its objectives and helping those in need.
Volunteering with us:
The Medics HELP Team:
A Note About Our Status:
Medics HELP is currently awaiting registration as a charity under the Income Tax Act. We do not expect any problems with charitable status registration. However, we feel it is important for all to understand that while we are a not-for-profit organization with charitable objectives, we have not been officially declared a charity under the Income Tax Act as of yet. As soon as we achieve charity status this note will be updated.
Please see our "Projects" page for more details about Medics HELP.and our upcoming projects.
