HELP International

HELP International is a charitable organization that works with government, charities, churches, and other community and business groups to identify economic, environmental and social problems and develop solutions that will have a significant and long lasting impact.
History
HELP International was founded in 1993 simultaneously as a federally incorporated non-for-profit corporation and a registered charity in Canada and in Kenya, Africa. HELP was founded by Rodney Sidloski, a returning aid worker who worked for a decade managing emergency relief programs with WUSC, WFP, and CARE International in drought relief in Darfur (Sudan), war-time relief in Mozambique, and drought relief in Kenya.
HELP International is the legally acceptable acronym for: Health, Education & Livelihood Project International and is distinct from another organization with the same acronym that was founded in Utah in 1996.
HELP International's Mission is to research and innovate lower cost and more effective ways of helping and to model those practices in upscale projects in Canada and internationally.
Key activities
Education
Help International has hosted hundreds of school and university groups for full day and multi-day immersion programs at their Ecological and Development Theme Park. Educational activities have included traditional African house building, stone carving, fabric dying, solar cooking, manual vegetable oil pressing, manual water pumping, compression brick making, fibre board and hand-made papermaking, grafting and tree planting.
Environmental Research and Programing
The focuses of HELP International's environmental programming has been on phytoremediation and low-cost tree production.
Phytoremediation: the use of selective trees, grasses and forbs to solve targeted environmental problems.
HELP has provided leading phytoremediation innovations in:
i) salinity reversal on farms below man-made water reservoirs and municipal lagoons
ii) forest filters on flood plains below landfills and living forest caps on decommissioned landfills
iii) effluent irrigation woodlots associated with municipal lagoons
iv) remediation of oil saturated soils
v) stabilization and reclamation of coal fly ash fields
vi) stream margin forest buffers
Low Cost Tree Production
HELP's low-cost tree production research focus is, in the words of HELP CEO and lead researcher 'in search of the two penny tree'. Sidloski states "our intention is to develop tree production techniques so inexpensively as to remove all financial disincentives to anyone in the world who wishes to plant trees". That is, no one should be restricted from their desire to plant trees for lack of funds to acquire trees. Objective: Make trees accessible to everyone world-wide.

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