History
A BRIEF HISTORY:
St. Anthony’s Alliance was originally created in 1992 as a public witness to the founders’ beliefs that faith and action must go hand in hand in our ailing world. The board of directors of St. Anthony’s chose meeting the critical medical needs of victims of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as its first project. (St. Anthony’s was named after a monastery in Bosnia where the first shipment of medicine was stored.)
Through the Bosnia experience, a reliable method of working with local contacts and safely delivering medical supplies was developed. During the height of the war, St. Anthony’s recruited over 1000 supporters enabling the Alliance to meet a goal of supplying $10,000 worth of medicine every month or two without losing a shipment.
After the war in Bosnia ended in 1996, St. Anthony’s has shifted its focus to Central America. It has provided support to Rancho La Colorada, Mexico sending a grant to support nutrition and medical care, and also helped fund a project to teach families how to build dry latrines as part of an educational program that emphasizes not only the health benefits of latrines but also teaches how to compost the waste for growing food. Shortly after, St. Anthony’s spearheaded a pilot agricultural project to grow lavender and to teach women in the village to make lavender soap. Five years later, The Lavender Project is a thriving operation.
St. Anthony’s Alliance provides funding for women’s health care, pediatric services and hygiene education projects in communities in Haiti, Guatemala and Nicaragua. We have made a commitment to help fund a women’s health clinic in Fonds de Blanc for the next five years. In Guatemala St. Anthony’s has supplied the funds to purchase medicine for twenty community pharmacies in the rural highlands. For the past decade we have helped purchase medicine and critical medical supplies for the community of Mulukuku in Central Nicaragua with a catchments area of 20,000 people.
In Jos Nigeria, St. Anthony’s Alliance supports the Faith Alive Hospital in its efforts to combat the Tuberculosis epidemic amidst social, political and economic turmoil. Our most recent endeavor, begun in 2009 as an effort to build a relationship closer to home, has been in supporting the Casa de Salud Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We provide funding for an indigent fund for those patients who cannot afford their medications.
Since 2006 St. Anthony’s has been supporting the development of Azul Lavanda based in the small community of Rancho la Colorada. Rancho la Colorada is an extremely rural area with a population of about 900 living on vast fields of once rich farmland, parched by the sun and baked by years of drought. Subsistence farming has been the main economic activity for years and most able bodied men have left to seek work in other parts of Mexico or the United States just to feed their families.
St. Anthony’s Alliance visited Rancho La Colorada in 2005 and spent some time researching opportunities to develop and support this small community. In the spring of 2006, St. Anthony’s Alliance entered into a 5-year collaborative agreement with a group of 8 farmers whose irrigation pump had been broken for several years. St. Anthony’s funded the purchase of a new pump in exchange the farmers planted one hectare (about 2.2 acres) of lavender. Lavender was sourced and planted and this hardy plant has flourished in the touch agricultural conditions. The need to add value to the Lavender was also identified and a number of small scale projects were initiated including soap production.
