Dear Friend,

We hope your 2023 was all that you wished for, and even more in a positive way.

For us at the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco and the tens of thousands of families in the High Atlas Mountains, it will be forever marked by September 8 and the calamity that fell on that night. It is a year of rebuilding, healing, reenvisioning, forging uplifting partnerships, and entering 2024 with great optimism and total belief and comfort in our mission and society.

If we were to express to you and the world the critical community needs that we see around us, we would say this:

1. Psychosocial empowerment—helps local groups manage the emotions and conditions of loss and strategize and take actions for their own and their surrounding sustainable development.

2. Water infrastructure for drinking and irrigation and associated capacity building, including health—we integrate solar water delivery systems in these initiatives. This has been a long-time and pervasive call of rural Moroccan people.

3. Planting endemic fruit and forestry trees near and far and building the terraces to enable more planting—prevents future slides of tons of rock upon houses that wreaked such devastation on the people on that awful September night. HAF and community partners monitor the trees we plant at a recognized global standard, enabling supporters to improve carbon balance.

4. Meeting women’s and youth’s call for building their skills (literacy, managerial, technical) —fulfills their cooperative’s goals and entrepreneurial dreams, and they become mobilized agents of development change.

5. Restoration of cultural, historic, and sacred locations—fully integrates advancing local human development.

6. Immediate relief—in the form of food (particularly milk for young people), clothing, and intermediate shelter is a serious need.

The High Atlas Foundation partners with local communities to achieve these initiatives every day. Our expertise, built over 23 years, is assisting the people of Morocco in their own journey of what they want to create in their lives and creating the necessary relationships in order for these projects to be implemented and sustained by them. To all our Partners, our hearts’ gratitude.

At the end of this 2023 year that has revealed to us so much about ourselves, let’s give one great push to implement as much as we can. Let’s enter 2024 with yet another level of energy brought on by our giving now so that more Moroccan dreams need not wait any longer.

On behalf of all of us at HAF, we wish you total success, happiness, and health and extend our heartfelt appreciation for the friendship we have together.

Yours faithfully,

Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir

President, High Atlas Foundation

Marrakech

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