The founder and her vision.

Harriet With Her Haitian Friend in Grande Colline, Haiti

The Epiphany Now Foundation comes from good stock. Its founder, Harriet Prichard,
is not new to non-profit organizations. She organized the Epiphany Now Foundation right
on the heels of her retirement from twenty-three very successful years as the founder and
president of Alternative Gifts International, an organization that raised over 24 million
dollars during her tenure, making a significant impact in dozens of countries and raising
funds for over one hundred non-profit organizations.

Harriet Prichard has always had an educational approach to her life work and she sees
herself always as an educator. Harriet has two Masters degrees: one in Education from
UCLA and one in Religious Education from Princeton Theological Seminary. She
later taught Christian Education at the seminary, the third woman ever to be appointed to
the Princeton’s faculty. She spent her next seventeen-year career teaching music in the
inner-city elementary schools of Los Angeles. She has also been Christian Education
Director for several Presbyterian Churches in California and Washington. It was during
this time that she first got the idea to develop Alternative Gifts International as she strove
to find ways for church school children to become involved in the needs around the world.

Having firmly established Alternative Gifts International, she retired, but not for long.
Full of energy, she had the drive to respond to an epiphany she experienced during
several visits to Haiti where she saw a valiant people trapped in poverty and environmental
ruin. “Haiti just got me,” she says, her eyes misting with tenderness when she says the
word “Haiti.” Moving from empathy to action, she envisioned the impossible - the renewal
of an entire nation. So she got involved, setting up The Haitian National Coalition for the
Environment and creating the Epiphany Now Foundation to fund the needs of the coalition.
Her solution is unique in that it is a combination of several non-profit agencies along
with groups of motivated impoverished Haitians who share the responsibility of the
decision-making process. All action is local, democratic and grassroots. The mission of
the foundation is to build a partnership with the people of Haiti, empowering them to
overcome the crises by means of environmental protection and energy renewal. Also
important to her message is that the phenomenon of global climate change is impacting
the impoverished people of Haiti who will be the first affected by it, becoming
environmental refugees.

 

Wake up, truly listen and hear with an inner ear
the universal good news
that God loves the world,
the earth, its plants and animals and all of humanity.
Respond with enthusiasm and joy in sacrificial service today, now,
so that a new global vision for the poor and the planet, inspired by the Spirit,
brings glory to God alone, in a new day.