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Whether facing a difficult decisions or going about our daily grind in three countries, these are the values that uphold and inspire us toward our vision of eradicating the backlog of thousands of children in Iraq waiting for life-saving heart surgery.
- Multi-Dimensional Reconciliation
- Long Term Local Solutions
- Pursuit of Excellence
- Hope for the Hopeless
- Whole Solutions for Whole People
- Financial Transparency
Multi-Dimensional Reconciliation
Call it “settling accounts,” “setting to rights,” or the “restoration of friendly relations” - reconciliation is why we do what we do.
Countless thousands of children in Iraq are born with hearts that are “at odds” with the good intentions of GOD when He created the world. We want to set that physical situation to rights; to reconcile what is with what should be.
But a healed heart is an occasion for a 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 Arab Iraq, Kurdish Iraq, Turkey, etc makes it clear that these “global issues” are exacerbated by our closely held opinions about “the other.”
We work to “restore friendly relations” in order 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, and by ethnic struggles between Turks and Kurds.
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”.
We are just naive 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.
Long Term Local Solutions
We are committed to rendering ourselves useless in the next 7-10 years. In fact, every day we work to hasten the day of our departure.
One of our local solutions is our family participation program, through which we ask families to pay what they can (which is measured up against a working matrix we have of family assets, income, etc). This is meant to subvert the culture of dependence on foreign and governmental solutions alone and create buy-in among families so that they fully and meticulously participate in the care of their children and in their long-term education. Financial participation is not about creating an economic hurdle as much as it is a litmus test for the soul that asks a family What do you love more?
But we also seek local solutions by inviting organizations to work together toward a greater number of surgeries. It is often easier for a few organizations to mobilize a few thousand dollars than it is for a single organization to budget $10-15k for a single surgery. We work collaboratively, sharing the price, sharing the praise.
But even while we work to send children outside the country for the most urgent surgeries, we also work in the country to leave behind a better healthcare system than the one that was in place when we arrived. International networking and education opportunities coupled with in-country practice alongside world-renowned surgical teams is at the forefront of our agenda.
But we work so that the most significant legacy we leave behind is not just a few superior surgeons. Through our local revenue generation streams (e.g., Buy Shoes. Save Lives.) and our grassroots efforts among Iraqis, we aim to catalyze a communal value among Iraqis of creative engagement and passionate pursuit of local solutions to local problems. Because when most people in Iraq look at dying children the reaction is usually “that’s really sad, but it’s not my problem.” Above all, we hope our local solutions leave behind people in the community that are still motivated, empowered, and equipped to lead the way into the next phase of improvement.
For more see Local Solutions to Local Problems
Pursuit of Excellence
Bigger does not always mean better. And smaller does not always mean more precise, efficient, etc. Our commitment is to never grow for growth’s sake; or downsize, skimp, etc for the sake of preserving the supposed Holy Grail of “overhead vs. program costs” ratio. We do whatever it takes to be excellent. Even though Iraq has a number of problems toward which we could contribute solutions, we limit our focus to one attainable goal; one consuming vision that could change a nation; a tribe; a community; a family; a life.
It has taken a few years to get a handle on triaging children waiting for life-saving heart surgery. How can we make the greatest impact? What comprises a high-risk case? In whom should we invest our limited resources? It’s our focus on providing life-saving heart surgeries alone - without allowing ourselves to get distracted by other real needs in Iraq - that has helped us achieve what we have to date.
When it came time for us to choose a healthcare provider, we were influenced by the near- and over-capacity systems in the region that were stuck with long lead times for selected children. We needed to keep it in the region in order to keep costs low. We wanted to avoid lengthy visa processes. And we wanted a center that would join us in caring for the whole person; not just treat their disease.
We were surprised and blessed by our partnership with the Johns Hopkins Affiliate Anadolu Medical Center in Istanbul, Turkey. Not only does Anadolu Medical have some of the most world class facilities in the Middle East and Central Asia, but their ability to serve our children in a friendly, timely manner has been remarkable. All of this amounts to more children with the most difficult heart diseases being served in a wonderful environment at a cheaper total cost in a shorter amount of time.
But excellence is about what we do “at home” in Iraq before it can be meaningfully about anything else. Excellence is what we do with Kurdish shoemakers in helping them make their craft more scalable, comfortable, marketable, and profitable. It is about listening to our customers and donors in America and responding to your critiques and requests. And excellence is about using our various platforms to tell the stories of Iraqi families in a way that accurately portrays their dignity and confers the honor they deserve.
Hope for the Hopeless
The aforementioned excellence has made us the top choice by local doctors and organizations to take the most difficult cases; the riskiest; the urgent; the last chance children.
We’ve come to understand that this is our organizational place in the matrix; in the coalition of those working to subvert the effects of decades of chemical warfare, prenatal malnutrition, and intra-family marriage.
Thankfully, our organizational position is entirely consistent with who we are as individuals as well. 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.
But make no mistake: we see more death than other organizations our size. There is no sure thing in this work. But we just haven’t figured out how to put a price tag on hope. So we keep giving it away as freely as we can.
Whole Solutions for Whole People
But our status as “last chancers” does not mean that we’ll take just anyone or that we lack standards against which we make our decisions and measure our success.
We value whole solutions to whole problems and treat every child we serve as a whole person.
It’s not enough for us to provide a risky, last chance heart surgery if we can be relatively assured that a child is not going to be positively impacted by the surgery. There is a difference between a surgical success (in the technical sense) and a “high impact” result. We aim for impact; and high impact at that.
When a family appeals for surgery, we begin what is often a 10-12 month formal relationship with the family, including pre-op screenings, home visits, meals together, financial consultations, logistics preparation, travel, surgery, and a six month commitment to our Followthrough program back in Iraq.
When asked “who are we” our staff uses words like “encouragers,” “servants,” and “motivators.” Relationships and love are at the top of the priority list for all our Family Advocates.
And because we are committed to seeing families through their surgery and on into their post-operative course, we take long term impact seriously. We are not sending kids out of the operating room and calling it a success as though the road ahead were somebody else’s problem. It’s our problem. And one of the ways we take that problem seriously is by trying to balance our impulse to be “last chance” people with our instinct to be “long term” people.
We measure our medical success in terms of long-term quality of life; not surgeries completed.
Financial Transparency
Even though we are a new non-profit organization and do not yet have our 990 available for public review, we strive to provide as much relevant information as we can so that you are left with as few questions as possible.
When families pay in for their own healthcare, we tell you how much they have given. When we partner with other Iraqi organizations or the government, we let you know.
We try not to talk in vaguish terms like “proceeds” when referencing our Buy Shoes. Save Lives. program. Our FY 2009 (to date) profit ratio for the program has been 31%; meaning every purchase sends $53 to Kurdish shoemakers in Iraq and that it requires an average of $22 per order to ship from Iraq to our U.S. warehouse and then on to your house - wherever you are in the world (including t-shirt shipping, etc).
We reinvest the “principal” into the Kurdish economy through further shoe purchases and roll over an average of $31 per pair to help us fund heart surgeries.
Incidentally, 57.4% of our tshirt sales are profits that help us fund heart surgeries.
All of our foreign staff raise their own salaries.
But saying we value financial transparency is not the same as actually doing it. So if you have other information you’d like to see us publish, don’t hesitate to ask. We’ll do our best to comply.
