Hooray for Barbara! Hooray for Convene!

Last night our own Barbara Palmer took home a Gold Award as part of Association Media & Publishing's EXCEL competition, which every year honors the best in association magazines, newsletters, websites, books, and other publications. Barbara won for "7 Days in Port-au-Prince," the amazing Leading by Example article she wrote about her visit to Haiti with an organization called Healing Hands for Haiti last March.

If you haven't read it yet, do it right now. If you have, read it again. And join us in congratulating Barbara for this well-deserved honor.

And congratulations to our design team -- Mitch Shostak and Roger Greiner of Shostak Studios -- for taking home a Silver Award for the cover of our February 2010 issue. At a time when the Twitter Revolution was already in the rearview mirror, they helped us find something new to say about, as our cover lines put it, #SocialMedia&Meetings. And the package of stories this cover fronted -- collectively headlined "Do We Have Your Attention?"-- was pretty darn good, too. Isn't it great when pictures and words work together like that?

Haiti: A Moment for Hope

Today marks six months and one day after a violent earthquake devastated Haiti -- and exactly six months after the non-profit organization Healing Hands for Haiti (HHH) -- which provides rehabilitation clinical services and education in Haiti -- began rebuilding its own heavily damaged operations.

Convene traveled to Port-au-Prince in March, with PCMA member Jean Tracy, a HHH former board member and volunteer, to chronicle the organization's work. HHH volunteer doctors, physical therapists, and others worked long, physically and emotionally draining days as they divided their time between providing clinical care to earthquake victims and Haitian orphans, and to getting Healing Hands back on its feet.

At the six-month mark, there is no shortage of stories in the media measuring how far recovery efforts have -- and haven't -- come. There are far too many people suffering in Haiti today, and much work to be done. But there is also reason to feel hopeful, including about Healing Hands' progress. From its directors:

The process of redeveloping Healing Hands for Haiti began the day after the earthquake of January 12 of this year. Five months later, we are almost back to full service. A new prosthetic fabrication and physical therapy facility at rented quarters in Port au Prince, developed in partnership with Handicap International, has fitted and cared for hundreds of pre- and post- earthquake amputees and disabled patients. Demolition of destroyed buildings at our main campus is almost finished. Our emergency and rehab medicine tent clinic at the main site has been closed in anticipation of the opening of a new, rented facility to house a modern clinic, physical and occupational therapy rooms, classrooms and offices. We have increased our deployment of rehabilitation medical teams on a weekly rotation basis to hospitals, clinics and orphanages throughout Haiti. Among our special charges are the 150 spinal cord-injured, who suffered among the most devastating injuries in the earthquake.

The photograph above is courtesy of Handicap International, copyright: © William Daniels for Handicap International

Confidence is Contagious

PCMA member Jean Tracy, senior national sales director for the George Fern Company, is living proof that confidence and compassion are contagious.

Tracy is a longtime volunteer for Healing Hands for Haiti, a non-profit organization which provides rehabilitative services to Haitians, It was Tracy's idea that I accompany the group to Haiti, and she convinced me, with a couple of phone calls and e-mails, that such a trip was possible. In Haiti, whether it was reorganizing overflowing pharmacy shelves or figuring out a way to salvage construction supplies amid post-earthquake wreckage, Tracy boldly moved forward toward solutions, without a lot of fanfare. After spending an hour in Tracy's company at a Haitian orphanage, a volunteer from the U.S., a teacher from New Hampshire, looked over at me and declared: "I'm just going to follow Jean around."

I concluded the story I wrote about Healing Hands for Haiti with a note on Tracy's continuing relief efforts in Austin, where she lives. She was purchasing a shipping container and was collecting tents and clothing for the Haitians left homeless by the quake. You'd think I would have learned something in Haiti about how Tracy's unshakable confidence inspires others to get on board. But I got a lump in my throat, thinking of Tracy in Austin, spending her spare time collecting tents and clothing. It seemed -- like so much of what I saw in Haiti -- to be like bailing out a boat with an eyedropper.

So I was delighted -- and had to laugh a little at myself -- when she forwarded me a message from the George Fern Company COO Aaron Bludworth to his employees. Bludworth is making Tracy's tent drive a company-wide effort. He's even sponsoring a friendly contest to spur participation: whichever of the company's two dozen branch offices bring in the most tents to ship to Haiti will be treated to a barbecue. "It doesn't take much," Bludworth wrote to employees, " to make a difference."

Especially when mixed with confidence and compassion.

In Praise of Logistics

Meeting planning is not all about logistics.
But logistics have never looked so good to me as it did in Haiti, where I traveled in late March with Healing Hands for Haiti, an organization that provides physical therapy, prosthetics, and other rehabilitative services to Haitians with disabilities.

Promoting healing in post-earthquake Haiti was the heart and the soul of the mission, and most of the Healing Hands volunteers were doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. Their skill and compassion amazed me, as they worked long hours in difficult conditions – in tent hospitals and clinics in the tropical heat, with too many patients, and too few clinicians.

But I was struck, too, at the layers of effort that were added to relief work by the demand for coordination. Of airport arrivals, meals, transportation, security, and endless more arrangements. The need to move things from here to there, to make lists and plans, and then more plans. All things that meeting professionals do so exceedingly well that they make it look effortless.

It didn’t look easy in Haiti. And it meant the difference between having a doctor or nurse where they were needed or not. And helped remind me to thank those who do the hard work of logistics for making life better for the rest of us.

Housing Haiti

I usually love to fall asleep to the plunk of rain on the roof.

But it was a horrible sound to hear in Port-au-Prince, where I traveled in late March and saw thousands of men, women, and children living in tents and makeshift shanties following the January earthquake. People there aren't just in danger of being swept away by the heavy rains that fall at this time of year -- many of the tents are on unstable hillsides and in flood plains -- but the rain greatly increases the risk of disease.

So I'm happy to report here about a response from the meetings and hospitality industry aimed directly at providing shelter to Haitians. Orlando hotelier and philanthropist Harris Rosen, owner of Rosen Hotels & Resorts, has developed a prototype for a "Little Haiti House" -- a prefabricated, solar-powered, wind-powered 24' by 12' dwelling that can be built for less than $5,000 and erected in about two hours.

The Harris Rosen Foundation is working with several organizations in Haiti to buy land and is working with Haiti community leaders to get feedback about the prototype, before they begin to build the houses, a spokesperson for the foundation said.

The houses are just one component of Rosen's Haitian relief efforts. Harris Rosen personally donated $250,000 to jump-start a relief fund, and sent teams to Haiti soon after the disaster. More recently, the foundation delivered "Family Kits" of food and other essentials. And on May 22, the foundation is hosting a food drive on May 22 at Rosen Centre, and is pledging to personally deliver all the food collected to Haiti.

I was in Haiti to profile Healing Hands for Haiti, an organization which has provided rehabilitative therapy to amputees and to the disabled for more than a decade. George Fern Company Senior National Sales Manager Jean Tracy, a long-time volunteer for Healing Hands, is at the heart of the story, which appears the May issue of Convene, being mailed this week.

If you like to make a donation to Rosen's Relief-Rebuild-Sustain Program for Haiti, you can donate via PayPal at www.RosenHotels.com/Haiti.

Not Ignoring Haiti

As Salon pointed out in a story last week graphing news stories about Haiti before and after the January earthquake, the media --and we readers -- have a short attention span when it comes to Haiti. It's all too easy for most of us, most of the time, to ignore the suffering of those who live in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Not so for volunteers working with Healing Hands for Haiti, which supports rehabilitative therapy for amputees and victims of strokes and other diseases. When I traveled to Haiti last month with Healing Hands for Convene, most volunteers were making their second, or third, or fourth, or 20th visit. The organization, founder Dr. Jeff Randle, and volunteer Jean Tracy, senior national sales manager for the George Fern Company, are the subjects of a Leading By Example profile in the May issue, which is being mailed to subscribers this week.

The flood of doctors, nurses, and others who went to Haiti after the earthquake in January is analogous to the torrent of media coverage, now slowed to a trickle. Medical services are tapering off, although the need for medical care is acute.

Healing Hands continues to send teams to Haiti, as it has for the last ten years. The size and scope of the organization's work has been radically altered by the earthquake, but the doctors, nurses, and therapists I traveled with to Haiti would have been there anyway.

I'll be writing more here in the days to come, posting photographs from my week-long trip, as well as information about ways in which the meetings industry is supporting Healing Hands for Haiti, and other relief operations.

I hope others will chime in, sharing meaningful ways to keep our attention on Haiti.