URGENT NEED FOR AN FREE ADVOCATE AND A FREE LAWYER. This is a very brief presentation of a small number of the systemic Issues in Belize that have hindered our progress for 7 years.
Some Key Things you Need to Know before Volunteering or Partnering about how difficult it is to get operational in Belize
Our office and the home of director Gretchen Smith was destroyed in Hurricane Lisa in November of 2022 so at this time all staff, volunteers and interns work REMOTELY from home. The loss which totaled $75,000 USD was due to corruption and systemic issues. Hurricane Testimony is on the blog list.
We do not at this time have any land or offices or facilities or resources to pay anyone but we still continue to develop and implement strategy as we have capacity utilizing volunteers. Currently all of our education is done online or via whats app. We have well over 20,000 Belizean followers and probably close to 100,000 overall followers in the various online accounts
Capacity building can take years in Belize due to systemic issues that prevent access to resources. The director will explain this more to you but the bottom line is there is NO MONEY TO PAY ANYONE TO HELP WITH THE ABOVE AND EVEN IF WE DO GET FUNDS WE CAN ONLY HIRE BELIZEANS AND PERMANENT RESIDENTS OF BELIZE with very few exceptions so this volunteer work is NOT likely to transform into a job unless you get residency in Belize (takes two years). In some rare situations we can get a temporary employment permit for you as a volunteer but we currently have no resources to offer volunteers such as housing or even project resources. As far as hiring Belizeans we currently have over 150 applications on file so you would be in line after them. We expect to have 6 positions if we ever get operational and we have already selected those staff and have been training some of them for more than 3 years so no there is no opportunity for a job.
This is due to systemic structural violence including nepotism, cronyism, lack of transparency in grant resources, out right corruption and other systemic issues such as many CBOS and NPOs and NGOs not being able to register legally due to lack or resources for a lawyer or not qualifying for a bank account due to MLTPA and other laws that prevent a lot of us from getting any resources for capacity building.
For example, it took our founding director Ms. Gretchen Smith, a disabled person, 7 years and 12 applications and 8000 USD to get the NGO legal and she had to change the entire law and application process to make that happen. Currently we have been blocked out of getting a bank account for over two years due to systemic issues and we have applied 3 times. To complicate matters there is almost no accommodation in application processes anywhere in Belize for disabled people and no law related to that to be able to solve that problem so we literally have to write the law, get it passed through national assembly, restructure the entire system before we can even get a bank account for our NGO unless someone advocates for us and so far no one has.
As of 2024 we are 7 years into trying to get operational and have been legal 3 times and then they changed the laws and we had to start all over so 12 applications in 7 years to get NGO status and 8000 USD and 3 applications in 2 years to 2 different banks and we still don’t have bank account due to systemic problems so NO WE CANNOT PAY YOU and NO WE CANNOT SPONSOR YOU, WE CANNOT RECEIVE GRANTS OR FINANCIAL DONATIONS WITHOUT A BANK ACCOUNT HERE.
A few things that would help us are a fiscal sponsor in USA to incubate us as well as a larger organization in Belize to incubate us and provide fiscal oversight until we are operational here. The organizations MUST be willing to accommodate Ms. Smiths disability and understand she cannot get the therapy she needs to function properly due to lack of resources (costs 3000 USD a month). She is a victim of violence and police abuse as well as systemic abuse resulting in her disability. What she needs more than anything is an advocate to solve the bank account issue and deal with the utterly incompetent people in government offices.
She has no advocate at this time and needs one. Her father was her advocate and he died unexpectedly some years ago and since then she has not been able to find another advocate to speak on her behalf to push forward her visions. When he was alive she completed many projects and after his death she continued to do many more successful projects until there was an extreme injustice in 2013 in Mexico that destabalized her. She got some therapy for that and stabalized and completed her projects and functioned well until she hit corruption and systemic violence in Belize. She stood up to the corruption courageously all the way to the ombudsman level and she was denied her right to put her case into court. Without resources she is unable to get the therapy she needs (EMDR) and it is 6000 BZD a month for that therapy and she needs help with her lung issues and hearing issues as well and there are no resources for that either and all of that was caused by corruption and she has been unable to get justice. She is located currently in Hopkins Belize.
She came to Belize with hopes of overcoming her disability and stabalizing and launching her NGO and business but instead was further traumatized by a system that is not set up to help marginalized and traumatized people to function. This entire process should have been very simple and taken absolutely no more than six months but probably it should have taken more like 2 weeks and it has been 7 years and she has repeatedly informed every person she speaks with that she is disabled and needs accommodation. The accommodation she requested was a whats app number for one point of contact at each organization that could solve the issues for her and for WRITTEN communication. There are over 400 emails in her email system that were sent to government agencies and they did not respond in writing forcing her to call and engage with incompetent secretaries who do not fix the systemic issues.
The government agencies and banks still refuse to respond in writing to her hardly ever. She is working on compiling the data but it appears that about 15 percent of the messages she sends are replied to…the rest are completely ignored. The websites of government agencies should have online forms where there is a link or box you can check to inform them that you are disabled. She informed every single person she met that she was disabled but no accommodation was made in the application processes until she forced the issue and still the accommodation is extremely substandard and clearly they still are not solving ANY SYSTEMIC ISSUES with their email systems (large attachment size, goes to spam, get deleted by incompetent staff or not forwarded, gets ignored).
The staff of all agencies rarely if ever follow up with a competent written answer although there has been some slight improvement in that area. The customer service refuses to transfer you to any IT person who can actually solve the programming problems or any director because they don’t want to get in trouble for failing to do their job. There is no way to file a complaint online to any independent group to hold them accountable to doing their job and yet international agencies give millions to the government of Belize and ALMOST NONE OF IT REACHES THE PEOPLE. There are an estimated 300 or more unregistered NGOs, CBOs and NPOs and 5000 churches or so that are not registered or legal and only the ones who have an old bank account from old registrations can function. The banks will now require updated registrations but they can’t afford to register and there are no pro bono lawyers to help anyone. There are no training courses or templates online to help them and they barely use computers so they are 100 percent blocked out of all international funding and the government says they are fixing this situation and they are not.
If a person like Ms. Smith with 25 years of experience in 9 countries cannot get legal and functional then how on earth is the little local fisherman who wants to form a cooperative and set up export of seaweed supposed to get operational. There are 0 measures for capacity building of people that are not registered or don’t have a bank account and not being able to do those things IS THE PROBLEM. We are intentionally and systemically blocked out from getting registered and getting a bank account to ensure we cannot thrive here because that would result in an end to corruption. The only way people get legal is through nepotism or cronyism or by hiring a very expensive lawyer.
All Ms. Smith ever wanted was legal status and a bank account for her NGO and her consulting firm which should have taken a few weeks and then she would start the grant writing process and get operational for both within 2 years. She is a very competent leader even though she is disabled and she has NEVER ONCE BEEN TURNED DOWN FOR A GRANT UNTIL COMING TO BELIZE AND THAT IS IN 25 YEARS OF OPERATION IN 9 COUNTRIES. As of 01/07/2024 both the NGO and the Consulting firm are still hindered and barely operational. The NGO has no bank account and the consulting firm was recently struck off and she had to fight to re-instate it. She submitted her annual report for the consulting firm via email after informing them she could not get their system to work and they said that was okay and then they struck her company off anyway and ignored 16 emails and 12 whats app messages and failed to answer the phone for over 6 days. Finally she lost here temper at them and they fixed it.
Belize Bank NGO applications have expired twice due to lack of proper documents from companies registry. Page 12 was missing in the certified copies provided by companies registry. She corrected this at companies registry BEFORE she was approved as an NGO. She brought this to attention of companies registry repeatedly and submitted the corrected documents six more times and they told her to pay again for the documents. She has now paid for the documents 6 times and every single time the documents are wrong. Ironically it was not a missing page at all, just a formatting problem with a page break so page 12 was never actually missing..it was blank and it WAS FIXED BEFORE THEY APPROVED THE NGO.
Heritage Bank utterly refuses to put into writing why they won’t approve the NGO bank account and they keep asking for the same documents over and over and over again but their email system can’t handle attachment sizes nor will the accept a link to google drive so you have to send it to the personal email addresses of staff who stopped responding and all emails are ignored. The documents have been submitted to Heritage bank 32 times and there are well over 50 unanswered emails to Heritage Bank and their staff. They have repeatedly refused to accommodate her and let her have one COMPETENT person at the bank to speak with as her point of contact. The last person she spoke with at Heritage did not even know the difference between a Trust and an NGO and she could not handle having to educate their staff about the laws of Belize and basic information that they should already know if they are employed at the bank. Every complaint about incompetent staff is ignored completely and 0 accommodation for her disability is provided. There systems are so bad that attachments bounce back due to size and you have to send to the personal email accounts of staff to submit attachments which is absurd.
So
NO. We cannot provide housing for you
NO. We cannot provide stipend for you
NO. We cannot offer you travel expenses
NO. We cannot offer you a job
NO. We cannot offer you expenses for the volunteer work
NO. We cannot offer you salary
NO. We cannot pay your living expenses
YES. We can sponsor you for your volunteer work permit however that process is non functioning and the last 3 times we applied we received no email response whatsoever.
YES. We need a lawyer to solve all of this and get the company and the NGO operational but there is no money to pay them.
YES. Ms. Smith needs an advocate to be her voice because if she has to speak to even one more incompetent or corrupt person she is likely to have an extreme episode of PTSD that she wont recover from ever.
Perhaps you think her story is unusual in Belize. IT IS NOT. Only big foreign developers get to operate in Belize because they grease the hands of greedy people along the way. SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE IS REAL AND IT IS THE CORE OF ALL OF THE PROBLEMS IN BELIZE.
So, if you are good at solving systemic violence contact Ms. Smith IN WRITING. She ALWAYS prefers written communication to avoid triggering her C-PTSD.
VIA WHATS APP, SIGNAL OR TELEGRAM TO +501-672-0547
OR TO TALLARTIST@HOTMAIL.COM