 .:BACKGROUND |
HELP is a charitable nongovernmental organization (NGO) founded by a returning agricultural aid worker who spent eight years in Africa’s emergency and development programs under the U.N., CARE, and WUSC. HELP’s head office is located at HELP’s Center for Ecology Research and Training on the City Farm at Weyburn, Saskatchewan. HELP maintains an overseas office in Nairobi, Kenya.
HELP Governance
The organization is governed by a board of directors consisting of members from across Saskatchewan as well as Washington including persons from the following professions: environmental sciences, education, international development, and corporate sector.
Legal Status
HELP International was founded in 1993 and is a federally incorporated charity (1994) with provincial registration number 212283. The organization has a tax deductible charitable number 892363847RR001
Mission
HELP’s Principal Mission is to train Canadians and international collaborating partners in leading edge strategies in the helping sciences. HELP builds on inherent strengths of agrarian culture to create leaders in the helping sciences both at home and internationally.
Achieving the Mission
HELP works in partnership with governments, fellow NGOs, local community based organizations, and the business community.
HELP believes that to create successful programs, all stakeholders must be empowered.
HELP programs strive to meet critical needs, to solve problems which have defied solution, and to deliver those solutions in a scope and scale which will make a significant impact in remediating the problem.
The vast majority of HELP programs fall under the two categories of Environmental Programming and Economic Development. Indeed, HELP models and assists in low-capital-requirement economic opportunities in the housing, agro forestry, zero waste industry sectors to achieve environmental programming objectives.
Environmental Programs
HELP and its municipal partners in Canada and Kenya developed a five-part strategy in environmental protection. These include forest buffer river protection, landfill leachate control, bio-remediation of sewage wastes and industrial waste sites, phytoremediation for salinity control and lastly, zero waste home and community management.
Canada Programming
- Souris River and Farm Protection Program
- Stream Margin Forest Buffers
HELP has implemented the largest forestation of cultivated stream margins in Canada with 220 km of forest buffers established along stream margins in fifteen municipalities.
- Living Landfill Caps
HELP has established the first living landfill caps in Canada with urban municipalities across southern Saskatchewan by installing phytoremediation tree caps on top of decommissioned landfills and forest filters around the base of active landfills.
- Effluent Irrigation Woodlots
HELP has established the first woodlots for community-wide effluent irrigation in Saskatchewan at Halbrite, Stoughton, and Gull Lake. This is part of a larger effort to stop the general North American practice of discharging nutrient filled effluent into the watershed.
- Salinity Control Phytoremediation
HELP research proved that a combination of select high water use and salt resistant tree and grass permanent cover can completely reverse severe soil salinity in seven years. HELP is under contract to Sask Power to install forestation for salinity control below the Poplar River Power Station near Coronach, Saskatchewan. HELP has also installed saline reversal forestations around sewage lagoons across southern Saskatchewan.
Kenya Programming
All Kenya programs fall under two program focuses
- Slum Conversion Program
The Slum Conversion Strategy worked out between HELP and the City of Nairobi
has carried out community organization into Home Associations, Housing and School developments, Urban Forestation, and Zero Waste Community Management involving the establishment of twelve low cost technologies for the manufacture of new products from waste.
- National Agro Forestation Program
This program in fifteen districts of Kenya organized farm communities into units of ten farms (Home Associations), set up community based agro forestry nurseries, and is piloting a scheme for utilizing fence lines for intensive fruit tree and fruit/vegetable vine fruit production and 1/8 acre of margin land for intensive commercial forestation.
HELP CERT
HELP’s Center for Ecology Research and Training is a ten-acre river front farm outside Weyburn, Saskatchewan. The center is made up of:
- The logistics center for HELP’s forestation program around the province
- A Simulated African Village
- The only zero waste managed property in Canada where 100% of waste produced at the center is converted into new value-added products.
- The first community wide Styrofoam recycling and processing program in Saskatchewan.
- An annual six-month International Green Internship Program attracting post secondary interns from several African and European countries and from across Canada. This program has been ongoing since 1994.
- Summer live-in grade school eco-camp program
- Aggressive applied agro forestry and zero waste research program
Current exciting research at HELP includes:
- Zero waste manufacturing technology development for:
- Fiber board manufacturing
- Styrofoam milling
- Paper milling
- Effluent irrigation
- Solar dehydration toilets
- Methane digester toilets
- Silviculture research: In search of super low-cost tree proliferation techniques
- Spontaneous fence line tree proliferation development
- Direct tree to container seedling production invention
- Floating nursery system invention
- Tree cuttings proliferation research
- Horticulture Research
- Root training techniques to develop drought-resistant vegetables and far superior production.
HELP Donors
Major donors to HELP projects have included: CIDA, Environment Canada, Agriculture and Agri Food Canada, Sask Environment, Sask Power, Sask Energy, Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation, Saskatchewan Environment Industry Managers Association. Significant contributions are made by HELP’s collaborating municipalities, private landowners, schools, local service organizations and ENGO collaborators.
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