How We Help
HHF helps children to rebuild their lives through the Self-Sustaining School Model, which has three key components: Education, Technology and Sustainability.

Self-Sustaining School Model

1. EDUCATION HHF identifies schools in areas adversely affected by natural disasters and builds or rebuilds them in a disaster-proof way allowing children to be safe and to begin the healing and recovery process. Education and safe educational facilities are the best investments we can make in the effort to overcome and prevent the damaging consequences of natural disasters and poverty.

2. TECHNOLOGY Within each school, HHF establishes a computer lab with the needed IT software, hardware and training in order to create more opportunities for children to have better educational and employment options in their lives.

3. SUSTAINABILITY HHF focuses on assurance of sustainability for schools. If governmental support is lacking in this area, HHF creates independence through its sustainability initiatives. HHF incubates and fosters a community-oriented business as a programmatic companion to the new schools, thereby ensuring a long-term funding stream for the maintenance and development of the school, and by extension, the community.

The Gap
HHF focuses its efforts during the gap between first response and recovery. When large scale natural disasters occur, first response focuses on immediate and temporary solutions to the most urgent problems of rescue, food, water and medical care. Often it is years before permanent recovery plans are made and solutions implemented. Typically, the gap between first response and recovery lasts from two to ten years and during this time, organized intervention and philanthropic support is usually absent. The longer this gap lasts before real recovery, the more trauma, pain, sadness and dysfunction take root and shape the lives of the children, families, and communities. Some of the world’s most desperate situations exist where temporary solutions became permanent, inadequate replacements for the life, culture, and community functions that were destroyed.

HHF provides a bright future where natural disasters have created misery by bridging the gap between first response and recovery. HHF identifies schools that have been devastated in communities of significant need. By rebuilding these schools, it provides islands of stability around which a community can begin to heal.