SANTO DOMINGO. – The founder and CEO of the Batey Relief Alliance, Ulrick Gaillard, was named on Monday, May 6, 2013 President of the Dominican Republic’s Lions Club Arroyo Hondo Santo Domingo (Club de Leones Arroyo Hondo Santo Domingo). Mr. Gaillard will officially take position of the one-year volunteer post on July 1, 2013.

The Lions Club Arroyo Hondo Santo Domingo is part of the Chicago-based Lions Clubs International organization that has for mission empowering volunteers to serve their communities, meet humanitarian needs, encourage peace and promote international understanding through Lions clubs.

Mr. Gaillard has been a pivotal actor strategically positioning the club within the highly competitive Lions organization and to international donors and partners to build in record time two modern medical facilities inside Dominican’s sugarcane plantations rural “batey” communities delivering comprehensive health services and medicines and HIV/AIDS treatment to 35,000 people annually; and to prevent blindness among and distribute thousands of eyeglasses to vulnerable and impoverished children and their families in the country’s urban and rural slums. The impressive track record of the club earned it in 2012 the recognition of being “…the most active Lions club within the Dominican Republic.”

Mr. Gaillard will be joined by a team of officers including Dr. Ana Celia Carrero, President-Affiliation, Virtudes Berroa, First Vice President, Gloria Basora, Second Vice President, Elis Cepeda, Secretary, and Migdalia Montilla, Treasurer.

NEW YORK, New York. – The founder and CEO of the Batey Relief Alliance Dominicana, Ulrick Gaillard, joins the rank of Dominican personality, investigative journalist and television producer Nuria Piera, to receive from the Rotary Club of New York Rotary International’s prestigious honor—Paul Harris award. The ceremony was held on April 29, 2013 at the Harvard Club in New York City.

For sixteen years, Gaillard worked tirelessly to engage the Dominican authority, international community and local groups in dialogues and to address one of the Dominican Republic’s most controversial and highly sensitive issues—the questionable conditions of hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised and undocumented Haitian workers and their Dominican descendants languishing inside the country’s sugarcane plantations rural communities known as “bateyes”. “Despite their size and critical role in the Dominican economy, the batey populations are vulnerable and severely affected by extreme poverty, diseases and hunger – and suffer inordinately from economic isolation, healthcare disparity and government neglect,” said Gaillard.

While Gaillard applauds the efforts made by the country to work closely with the Batey Relief Alliance, through strategic partnerships with the international community and local groups, to improve the ills that persist within those bateyes, such as high rates of HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis, malnutrition, fertility and infant mortality, and unemployment; the lack of basic services; and the non-legal status of the populations, he warns that unless a true political will emerges to reverse the status-quo, the situation could become more difficult to manage – and turn into a severe humanitarian crisis. “When neither the parents nor the children are legally documented, they forcibly become invisible under the country’s radar hindering them from going to school, receiving social security benefits, holding a bank account or obtaining formal employment – they exist within a system that could practically cripple their growth,” added Gaillard.

More than 1 million undocumented foreigners live and work in the Dominican Republic. A vast majority are impoverished Haitians and their Dominican descendants—accounting for anywhere between 7-12% of the total Dominican population. Through partnerships with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), US Department of Agriculture (USDA), UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Dominican government and international aid groups, BRA secured more than $70 million to carry out its humanitarian mission in the province of Monte Plata by installing modern medical centers and HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment Units; and running community development programs of food security and cooperative agriculture, women empowerment, microcredit, deworming/multivitamins, water/sanitations, education and disaster relief, servicing more than 100,000 people annually in those bateyes. In 2010, BRA expanded its work into the border regions of Haiti.

Ulrick Gaillard is a United States-trained attorney with professional backgrounds in political science and government and pursued Leadership Studies at the Harvard University JFK School of Government. After collaborating in 2005 with the Clinton Foundation HIV-AIDS Initiative to develop the first HIV-AIDS ARV treatment program for people living with HIV-AIDS/Tuberculosis in the bateyes, President Bill Clinton invited Gaillard in 2011 to join membership with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).

To learn more about BRA’s work, like on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Batey.Relief.Alliance; follow on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bateyrelief; and visit www.bateyrelief.org.

SANTO DOMINGO, D.R. – As part of its Blindness Prevention program in the Dominican Republic, the Batey Relief Alliance (BRA) joins forces with the Student Volunteer Optometrists for Service of Humanity of the New England College of Optometry—SVOSH-NECO to bring 17 students and faculty to deliver critical eye care to 1,200 poor children and adults with severe eye problems in Santo Domingo’s inner city neighborhoods called Las Americas, where thousands of undocumented Haitians and Dominicans live in vulnerable conditions. The five-day eye care intervention will take place at BRA partner’s Community Center, Family Outreach Ministries International – and co-sponsored by the Lions Club Arroyo Hondo Santo Domingo.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that blindness affects over forty million people around the world, and that poor vision disables 135 million more. More than ninety percent of these people live in developing countries. Although effective prevention and timely treatment would eliminate eighty percent of global blindness, prevention and treatment of eye problems are inaccessible to many in the developing world, including the Dominican Republic. The unmet need for prescription spectacles frequently limit adult employment opportunities and reduce children’s ability to read and learn.

BRA’s CEO, Ulrick Gaillard remarked that the mission, in its seventh consecutive year with the SVOSH group, will take place from April 8th-12th, and will draw a crowd of hundreds that will travel far away to take advantage of this once-in-a-life-time opportunity to check or treat their vision and receive a pair of eyeglasses—all free of charge. Gaillard added that the optometry volunteer group is fully equipped and self-sufficient, and will travel with sophisticated machines, thousands of dollars in medicines, eye drops, eyeglasses and supplies. Patients who need follow-up or specialized care or custom-made eyeglasses will be referred to BRA’s medical center located inside Batey Cinco in the province Monte Plata where complete optometric and ophthalmological care is provided to hundreds in each year.