From President & Founder, Florence Reed:

Ever since founding SHI fourteen years ago, it has been my greatest hope and expectation that the changes we make possible in the world will be permanent.  I did not want us to be one of those myriad development programs that improves things while they have an active project in an area only to find that everything reverts to the status quo once the project ends.  It was also one of my greatest hopes that SHI’s impact would spread well beyond the families with whom we work directly, ultimately empowering entire communities and countries. I honestly felt a lot of uncertainty, however, about how much we could expect this to happen.

This past autumn, my greatest hopes for SHI’s work in Central America were met and exceeded! That was when I got the word that a survey conducted with families who graduated from SHI’s program in Honduras more than two years ago showed that 100% of the families continue to use a variety of sustainable farming practices.  At the same time, these families have benefited from incomes that increased by an average of 39%!  I was especially pleased to see that the families surveyed have all given up slash-and-burn farming as a regular practice, instead using the sustainable practices they learned from our field trainers.  The most amazing news, however, was that the abandonment of slash-and-burn farming had spread beyond the participating families to the community as a whole. This is because each graduated family surveyed trained an average of seven more families.  I honestly had not expected such a big ripple effect from our work, and I could not have been more thrilled!  I am extremely grateful to the thousands of people who have made these amazing results possible.

Read the survey online: http://sustainableharvest.org/gradsurvey