AMURT-HAITI
AMURT started operations in Haiti in 1988, when it first opened a school under a tree in Port-au-Prince. Those years still mark the philosophy of the NGO, which heavily relies on volunteers from all over the world, and on a very close relationship with the local communities it seeks to serve. Since then AMURT has grown to include approximately 80 full-time employees forming five teams and working in areas as diverse as community health, environmental restoration, infrastructure, education, and more. Between '04 and '07 alone the NGO managed more than $2 million of International Aid, becoming one of the dynamic forces of change in northwest Haiti.
Photo: AMURT-Haiti Infrastructure Team, May, 07.
AMURT-Haiti is not an implementing agency, it is a facilitator of a dynamic process developing the full potentialities of each person through participative leadership and empowerment. The NGO emphasizes an approach of community development that supports partnerships with local committees, reinforcing their capacity to plan, realize, and manage in the long run their own projects. This approach reveals the organization's philosophy of implicating the community in all phases, and empowering them to become equal participating partners and leaders rather than mere beneficiaries of the development process. Similarly, AMURT pays special attention to working closely with women and children, and structures its programs so that they become actively involved in the facilitation process.
 Increasingly the initiatives of AMURT-Haiti seek to establish a local self-sufficiency and community empowerment that meets adequately the physical, mental, and spiritual needs of the communities it serves. All of AMURT's projects start with the very basic requirements of life - food, shelter, economic self-sufficiency. Increasingly the programs seek to develop within the local community a sense of self-worth and social engagement which aim at building a long-lasting atmosphere of transparency and harmonious balance between economic growth, social development, environmental sustainability, individual and collective interests.
This challenging phase of building balanced social and economic models of development sits upon the tenets of PROUT, the Progressive Utilization Theory. Propounded by one of the most advanced thinkers and philosophers of the XX century, P.R. Sarkar, this alternative social model challenges the conventional paradigms established by the rigid mechanistic structures of thought of Capitalism and Communism. In contrast to these, PROUT puts an emphasis on the balance between the physical, mental, and spiritual needs of each individual and the society as a whole. Combining the wisdom of universal spirituality and the struggle for self-reliance and autonomy, PROUT paves the way for a break-through in the current crisis and dearth of progressive solutions. Its basic tenets have increasingly provided guidance and structure to AMURT-Haiti's community empowerment and self-sufficiency philosophy.
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