Our Board of Directors has well over a century of combined expertise in serving the poor. Please see below for more information about them and their experience that we are so happy to leverage to help the poor of Haiti.
Pat Labuda – Executive Director
Pat Labuda has been working in Haiti for over 20 years since she began the Parish Twinning program between St. Francis of Assisi parish inRockville, MD and St. Pauls parish in Leon, Haiti in 1986. In 1987 Pat and three others from St. Francis visited Haiti. After that trip Pat organized andaccompanied additional parish groups, a high school group and a college group on trips to Haiti.
After the 1991 coup d’etat, Pat organized and led several human rights groups to Haiti. These groups met with OAS representatives, the Papal Nuncio and other officials. Pat also worked with the Haitian refugees living in the Washington DC area, and those being held in refugee camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She spent numerous hours visiting Congressional offices on behalf of the Haitian refugees. She helped many of the refugees apply for political asylum including the first unaccompanied minor allowed in to the country.
In 1996 Pat organized a group from St. Francis that included Dr. Frank Nice, a pharmacist at NIH. The following year Frank organized the first medical team to visit Leon. In a few years the number of medical teams going to Leon numbered five each year. She helped found Health and Education for Haiti to reach out to other underserved areas in the Grande-Anse. Pat has helped to organize and has accompanied every medical team going to Haiti since the beginning of the program.
Pat is a member of the Archdiocesan Global Outreach Committee. She was a member of the first diocesan team to visit Haiti in October 2004. She also participated in the second and third Global Outreach trips. She has worked with members of the Global Outreach team to encourage churches in the Washington Archdiocese to twin with churches in Haiti and has accompanied several parishes to Haiti who have chosen to begin a parish twinning program.
As a result of her commitment, Pat is in Haiti for most of February, June and October. She is very grateful for the support she receives from her husband and from their six children and families.
Richard Gustafson – Treasurer
Richard Gustafson is a Vice President for SAP National Security Services, Inc. He has over 20 years of accounting and Federal financial management experience, including 18 years of Federal financial management systems experience. He has experience with all three major ERP application packages (Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP). In addition, Mr. Gustafson has been responsible for the financial management activities of a Washington DC-based consulting firm. Those duties included the full range of financial management and payroll activities. He also previously served on the Board of Directors of Options: A Benefits Training Foundation, a California 501(c)(3) public charity.
Mr. Gustafson received a BS in Accounting from Indiana University and an MBA from George Mason University.
Frank Nice
Dr. Frank J. Nice currently retired from over 30 years of service to the United States. He has organized and participated in over a dozen medical missions to the country of Haiti. He served in the US Public Health Service for 30 years of service as a Commissioned Officer and pharmacist. He served 20 years of that time at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Neurosciences Program as Assistant Program Director.
Frank holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Pharmacy, a Masters Degree in Pharmacy Administration, and Masters and Doctorate Degrees in Public Administration. He holds Certification in Public Health Pharmacy and is registered as a pharmacist in Pennsylvania, Maine, Arizona, and Maryland.
In 2008, Frank received the President’s Call to Service Lifetime Award for his volunteer humanitarian work in Haiti. Please follow this link to read the article in the “NIH Record.” Frank was also profiled in the December 2009 NIH Clinical Center newsletter about our October 2009 medical mission to Carcasse.
Mike Goggin
Michael J. Goggin has been the Regional Director for the Ignatian Volunteer Corps since July 2012. He previously served as the National Executive Director of the St. Vincent Pallotti Center for Apostolic Development, the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington (IFC) as Assistant Director, and Director of High School & College InterFaith Programs and the Congregational Partnerships Project. In June of 2006, Mike was elected President of the North American Interfaith Network (NAIN), an umbrella group of 65 interfaith organizations in Canada, the United States and Mexico.
Mike earned his BSFS degree from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1992. He received the Outstanding Adult Leadership Award from the Archdiocese of Washington (1999), two youths in his program were named Outstanding Female Catholic Youth by the same organization (2000 and 2004). In the spring of 2005, Mike completed his MA degree in Theology with a concentration in Word and Worship at the Washington Theological Union.