Inaugural Post from ILF Founder Dan Wolf

Dear friends of Lifeline.  Welcome to our new blog.  We have launched this blog in an effort to get you better connected with our expat and local staff – about 100 strong and growing – who are the life blood of our organization.  Through the medium of cyber-space, you will be able to learn what Lifeline is really doing out there in the field and the affect our work is having on people who are living very different lives than those to which we are accustomed.  To this end, two of our staff members will be blogging each week from one of our four offices located in Uganda, Kenya, Haiti and DC.  As the founder and executive director of Lifeline, it falls on me to get the process started with our very first blog.  So here goes.

How It All Got Started

Believe it or not, Lifeline is the product of a lawsuit that I brought back in December 1999 on behalf of a group of American citizens who had been taken hostage by the former Iraqi regime following its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.  Most everyone thought that this was a lost cause.  Sure, you could probably get a court to award judgments to the victims but how were you ever going to get Iraq to pay them?  Go to war?  Well, we did go to war, but actually the victims got paid just before it began when we managed to get a law past giving them the right to collect their awards against blocked Iraqi assets that were sitting in two major US banks.  I took a substantial portion of my fee award and used it to start Lifeline and its sister organization, the George Wolf Memorial Trust, which is named after my father. 

What We’ve Been Doing These Past Few Years

Well, you can find out about most of what we’ve been up to by exploring our website.  But just to give you a brief history.  For the first couple of years, I didn’t have a lot of time to devote to Lifeline and so I teamed up with an organization I had been involved with since 1988 called Refugees International (RI) to help advocate for refugees in Africa and Asia.  In July 2004, I sponsored an RI mission to Darfur, where I saw for myself the extent to which deforestation had destroyed the landscape and learned about all the health, livelihood and security problems associated with cooking on an open fire.  A year later, in 2006, Lifeline launched its stove programs in Darfur and Northern Uganda.  Since then, we’ve had our share of ups and downs, but, over the next four years, we managed to provide stoves to about 50,000 impoverished villagers who were displaced by violence in those areas, another 10,000 or so to Somali and Burundese refugees in Kenya and Tanzania, and 5,000 more to victims of the earthquake in Haiti. 

Where We Go From Here

A few years ago, Lifeline was a fledgling start-up organization.  This year we have become the de facto lead agency promoting sustainable fuel technologies in Haiti.  In the years ahead, our goals are far more ambitious.  We hope to grow our water program to the point at which we will be providing a long term solution to the clean water needs of hundreds of thousands of African villagers who are currently drinking from stagnant pools.  With regard to clean cooking, we hope to dramatically expand our reach by using carbon credits to promote a market for affordable stoves to the poorest of the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti and beyond.  

That’s enough from me.  Tune in next week when you will hear from our country director and environmental program manager with the latest from Uganda.  I hope you enjoy the blogging and thank you all for your support for Lifeline and its mission.


Dan Wolf
Executive Director 
ILF Headquarters, Washington DC