Tycoon sets up charity with €1 million donation
Howard Lake | 2 March 2009 | News
An Irish telecoms tycoon has used €1 million of his fortune to found a charity and has set himself a target of €7.5 million to build and repair houses for Haiti’s poor.
Mr Leslie Buckley has appealed to the people of his home county of Cork for help building or repairing 3,000 homes in poverty-stricken Haiti and he wants to recruit hundreds of volunteers to work on his charity’s first building project in the western world’s poorest nation later this year.
His Haven Partnership is looking for builders, tradesmen, cooks or medical experts for the week-long build in Quanaminphe, in the north east of the Caribbean country, in October.
The vice-chairman of Digicel and long-time associate of billionaire businessman Denis O’Brien has set an ambitious target of raising €7.5 million to build 1,000 homes and repair or improve 2,000 homes over the next three years.
“It will transform the lives of between 15,000 and 18,000 Haitians,” Mr Buckley said.
Mr Buckley and his wife Carmel officially launched their charity last month with a personal donation of €1 million. It will cover their charity’s administration costs ensuring that all the money raised by volunteers goes directly to the charity.
Each volunteer must raise €4,000 to take part in the week-long build and pay 10% to sign up.
Well-travelled and a long-time supporter of Goal, Mr Buckley said it was his repeat business trips to Haiti that prompted him to set up Haven. “I have never seen poverty like I have seen in Haiti. Entire families live in shacks that we would not dream of putting an animal in,” he said.
Although modelled on the Niall Mellon Township Trust project, which builds homes in South Africa, Mr Buckley said has gone a step further and established local committees to select people to occupy the new homes once they are built.
www. havenpartnership.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.