WHO’S YOUR REGULAR HERO?

Our Regular Hero of the day, CrossRoads Alliance, is the reason our founder, John, started Regular Hero in the first place.  In 2010, a horrific earthquake devastated Haiti.  Dr. Bob Houlihan, the founder of CrossRoads and John’s grad school professor, solicited his class for donations.  He said that he and his partner Steve Ewing, the executive director, were in the process of shipping care packages and that they had the ability to send out their aid relief before any other organization. They had $10 million worth of food, water, medicine, hygiene kits, and other life essentials that they could ship to Haiti for only $14000.

Crazy you may ask? Yeah we know.

John raised his hand and asked what probably everyone in the room was thinking:

1) How are you able to acquire all of these supplies at an outrageously small cost?

2) How are you able to get it to Haiti before anyone else?

Here’s the answers:

When they started their organization 10 years ago, the 2 founders of CrossRoads came from working with a much larger humanitarian relief organization. They worked as administrators and oversaw all of the admission and logistical work and had experience in sending relief to countries all over the world. When creating Crossroads, they had the contacts and experience of a massive organization even though it was just 2 guys running the show.

For the other question, it was all thanks to Royal Caribbean. They had their own private dock located in Haiti used exclusively for their vacation cruise business. All of the public ports were shut down in Haiti for until they could organize when shipments could arrive. CrossRoads was ahead of the game and got in contact with Royal Carribean in order to coordinate the shipment of the aid packages.

CrossRoads is a small humanitarian relief organization that has the same, if not more, power to help people as their larger scale competitors. They are extremely resourceful and incur very little costs for administration operation. What they didn’t have is marketing, an updated website, fundraising materials, or anybody telling their story, which ultimately leads to very limited resources to do good.

We realized there is an epidemic in the small non-profit world of individuals and organizations in the field that are too busy feeding families, providing disaster relief, and changing the world to tell their story.  We want to raise awareness and resources for these Regular Heroes.  We want to spread the word of their heroic acts and also inspire everybody to be a Regular Hero, too.

WE WANT TO KNOW WHO YOUR REGULAR HERO IS:

Tell us how you or a friend is a Regular Hero. #MyRegularHero on Instagram/Twitter and tell us the story!  Did your friend hold the door open for a stranger, did you just get back from an aid relief trip, or did you raise money for some awesome cause?  Tag us for the chance to be featured on our page and receive some Regular Hero merch.