- + Long-Term, Local Solutions
When values conflict – as they often do – this is our priority. We shape everything we do so as to inspire local vision and willpower for the expansion and improvement of pediatric cardiac care across Iraq. We use the money that you generously give and leverage it toward partnerships with Iraqi and international counterparts that return up to 50:1 impact of the monetary value of your gift. Because Iraq has a highly centralized healthcare system, we work directly with the Ministry of Health – we don’t ignore or circumvent their priorities and authority. And because Iraq desperately needs privatized healthcare options and healthy competition to spur things along, we work with philanthropists in various locales toward the advancement of privatized healthcare to augment the state solutions.
We prefer to train doctors, nurses, and technicians in Iraq and teach them how to use what they have at their disposal over sending them to European institutes where the risk of losing them forever is high and the inclination to always demand the best new equipment might overshadow the more pragmatic option of learning to be excellent with the resources Iraq currently has to offer.
When you partner with us, you’re not giving hand-outs. You are doing development. Because we don’t insert our programs where they are not wanted and where they are not highly valued. We are sought out and pursued by families, doctors, and government leaders across Iraq. When we respond to local initiative, we get the support and enthusiasm required to see this long course through to the finish.
We aim to graduate our Iraqi programs from international monetary support by 2015. We aim to further graduate our Iraqi programs from international clinical support by 2020. We have an exit strategy. We exist as an organization to equip and leave. In fact, every day we work to hasten the day of our departure.
- + Whole Solutions for Whole People
We’re not a huge organization. We don’t maintain a highrise international headquarters in New York City or London. We have a small office in Iraq with just a few full-time staff. We’re not machines. We’re normal people. When asked “who are we” our staff uses words like “encouragers,” “servants,” and “motivators.” So we highly value relationships with our Kurdish and Arab hosts and with the families we have moved to Iraq to love and serve. Our love for them compels us to measure our success in terms of long-term impact; not surgeries completed.
When a family appeals directly to us for surgery, we begin what is often a 10-12 month formal relationship with the family, including pre-op screenings, home visits, meals together, logistics preparation, travel, surgery, and a six month commitment to our Followthrough program.
And because we try to see as many families as we can through their surgery and on into their post-operative course, we take long-term impact seriously. We don’t send children out of the operating room and call it a success as though the road ahead were somebody else’s problem. The long-term is our problem, too (which is one of the reasons we are so unswerving in our prioritization of long-term, local solutions). But the other ways we take that problem seriously is by balancing our impulse to be “last chance” people who help the most unlikely children with our instinct to be “long-term” people who carefully select children who are most likely to benefit from intervention.
- + Financial Transparency
This should be obvious, but finding financial data from many non-profits is like searching for WMDs in the Iraqi desert. We think you should check us out thoroughly before you make your investment with us. Project-based financial reports from our Remedy Missions and annual filings to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service are all available here.
Additionally, our extensive consideration of the most poignant and incisive Frequently Asked Questions is available here. If you have any questions or other information you’d like to see us publish, don’t hesitate to ask. We’ll do our best to make it happen.
- + The Pursuit of Peace
Call it “settling accounts,” “setting to rights,” or the “restoration of friendly relations” – reconciliation is a big part of why we do what we do.
Because a healed heart is an occasion for tempered celebration if your family is living in the middle of civil conflict between ethnic neighbors or regional superpowers. Sure, much of this strife comes from global issues that are beyond our reach. But a few days on the ground in Iraq makes it clear that these “global issues” are exacerbated by our closely held opinions about “the other.”
We work to unravel the effects of evil that were wrought by Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns, by years of sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims, by ethnic struggles between Turks and Kurds, and by the Iraq War.
And we give people over “here” a tangible opportunity to save a life over “there” and to see “those” people as exactly that: people. Humans. Sons and daughters. We are all more than the images we receive from the professional media. It’s not us helping them get over their differences. It’s us becoming reconciled with us.
Yes, we truly are optimistic enough to believe that when we start seeing each less as other and more as brother these “global issues” might start to change too. And if they don’t… well, we are still committed to making change in the neighborhoods where we live and work.
- + Hope for the Hopeless
Our track record for doing things with excellence has made us the top choice of local families, doctors, organizations, and government leaders. We are regularly asked and expected to take the most difficult cases–the riskiest, most urgent, last chance children.
This has been our modus operandi. We help more than we turn away. We say “yes” more than any other organization working on these issues. When asked to consider new training programs in some of Iraq’s most dangerous cities, our inclination is always to lean forward and begin brainstorming how we can make it happen.
This accords with who we are as individuals. Our staff is full of taker-inners, last chancers, and underdog lovers. We gravitate toward helping those in whom the light of hope is fading fast. There is something wired up inside us to lay ourselves on the line for those who cannot find solutions elsewhere.
Hear our volunteer educators and Iraqis talk about the importance of developing long-term solutions.
A glimpse into our relationship with Parzheen’s family – from surgery to recovery to a celebration dinner in her village!
Sheikh Ali – a local Muslim leader from Baghdad – has profoundly shaped our experience in Iraq as we’ve worked together to combat wrong perceptions about “The Other” in our respective communities.