A Million Hearts for Haiti Update

New Partner- International Folk Art Market-Santa Fe

As of April 1, 2013 Tesoros Trading Co. has helped to raise over $200,000 in donations to assist Haitians recover from the devastating earthquake of January 2010. Of that total $113,000 has been donated by Tesoros to the Hand Eye Fund for Haiti (other monies have gone to other non-profits, mainly Partners in Health). Thanks to the tremendous purchases by you, our customers, of hand carved stone hearts and other Haitian crafts, we have helped many artisan families reconstruct homes, workshops, and restart their businesses. Small grants from the Hand Eye Fund have also helped pay school fees for young artists, buy needed supplies and tools, /and/ financed new design work amongst more than a dozen groups of artisans throughout Haiti. Most significantly, the stone carvers of Leogane have been helped to restore or replace their small homes that were destroyed in the earthquake.

For more information, vist: folkartmarket.org.

As the bulk of the projects we could identify in Haiti have now been funded, we have decided to shift the donations going forward to help give Haitian artisans access to the US market through the International Folk Art Market-Santa Fe. Tesoros will continue to donate a portion of our wholesale sales of the stone hearts to finance first-time Haitian artists, new to the Santa Fe Market.

he Market provides opportunities for folk artists from Haiti and worldwide to have access to a global marketplace unlike any other. Through their involvement in the Market, folk artists are able to build dignified and sustainable livelihoods as well as preserve valuable, and in some cases endangered, cultural traditions.

Thank you all for helping the artisans and folk artists of Haiti in their ongoing efforts to recover from the Earthquake.