Dear Friends,

Five years ago at a quiet kitchen table, Kim Wilson and I outlined a plan to improve infant and maternal healthcare in Latin America. Crazy in ambition, our notion was simple in its construction.

Bring training and supplies from North America to support sweeping change in existing hospitals in Latin America. Introduce what has already been proven to work. Be culturally sensitive. Partner wisely. Operate at the local level, and for the long term. Start at a pilot site, rollout through a country. Keep pushing forward.

In partnership with Boston's Children's hospital we began.

We started carefully. We chose the Dominican Republic as our pilot country, collected medical supplies in Kim's garage, designed a simple program of intervention with friends in the Harvard Medical School community, and began crisscrossing the country, bringing donated equipment and doctors using their vacation time. We conducted rural clinics, toured local hospitals, trained health care workers and met with government officials. Our budget was roughly $30k/year and we resisted all but the most persistent donors. We wanted confidence that our program would significantly improve infant and maternal care at the local level - and scale quickly once established.

By the summer of 2006 we felt ready to take the next step. We established Infante Sano as a tax-exempt organization. We created an Advisory Board to help oversee our work. We opened our first in-country office, in the Dominican city of Bani, and hired Sarah Henry, our first employee. A Columbia School of Public Health graduate, Sarah had spent three years in the Dominican Republic with the Peace Corps. The regional hospital in Bani was to be the site of our first full-scale pilot program and Sarah would lead our effort to translate Harvard insight into sustainable local action. Our budget was now about $100k/year.

In November 2006, Kim and I brought several carefully chosen friends to take a look at our DR program. Stephanie Cabot, Ben Downs, Marcie Tyre and Linda McQuillan were among the group. We asked them to evaluate our work - not in a strictly medical sense, as Kim had built a gifted team to do that - but as thoughtful community leaders. Did our plan to embrace the UN's Millennium goal of improving infant and maternal healthcare make sense? Might it work? Could it scale? Could it be funded? Their enthusiasm and generosity along with the program's success on the ground gave us the confidence to accelerate our plans.

That was a year ago.

In Bani we've now trained hundreds of doctors and nurses in neonatal resuscitation, emergency obstetric care, and care for newborn babies - impacting 6,000 mothers and infants. We've remodeled and re-equipped the hospital's infant and maternal care facilities. We've opened two clinics for impoverished mothers and children and had more than 4,000 visits from them. Our local staff numbers 13 and we have just begun operating at our second site, in La Romana. We've built critical partnerships with the Dominican Ministry of Health and recently hired Dr. Filiberto Hernandez, an expert in rapidly scaling healthcare programs in Latin America from the Center for Disease Control, to head our efforts. Our programs have caused a measurable drop in infant deaths.

And in Boston, things are also progressing. Our medical program has advanced as Rachel Breman, who joined us as Program Officer after being trained at Johns Hopkins and spending years out in the field, and Kim Wilson work with Dr. Mari-Kim Bunnell, Dr. Anne Hansen and Dr. Karen Sadler to connect leading medical research with our implementation plans. Ben Downs, a talented and experienced entrepreneur, has taken responsibility for our operations, organizing key non-profit equipment suppliers to meet our rollout needs, spearheading our nascent communications program, overseeing our financial plans and assuring us of compliance with our legal and tax obligations.

Our development efforts have also grown. Our budget for 2007 was almost $600k and we are on track for that to grow significantly in 2008. We launched an Ambassador Program with generous individuals committing to contribute $100k/year for a number of years and introducing our work to foundations and individuals in their community. We already have the first four commitments of the nine we need by the end of 2008. Dozens of donors from the classroom to the boardroom have supported us; we are grateful for each and every one of them.

The crazy idea of five years ago - a twenty year plan to offer dramatic, measurable health improvements to mothers and infants in Latin America - seems just a little less nuts now. Maybe that's because our programs, though still developing, are clearly working. Maybe it's because such talented folks have been willing to work with us, and such generous ones willing to support us. Or maybe it's just because we finally abandoned Kim's garage and found an office!

This newsletter - our first - is the beginning of what we hope will be a long dialogue with you. If you've been supporting us, please accept my warmest thanks. If you have ideas about how we can improve our programs, more cost-effectively gather supplies, raise the money we need, or tell the story of our work, please contact us. We are eager for your help.

Yours,

Bill

Bill Haney

President, Infante Sano

December, 2007