About Us
Mission Statement
The Mission of Guyanese Outreach is to support the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Guyana, South America. Our vision is to work with the Guyanese people to strengthen, value, and enhance their own culture by helping them meet spiritual and physical needs. To help with spiritual needs, we partner with local churches. We help the poorest of the poor meet physical needs by providing humanitarian aid. To address systemic poverty, we provide functional literacy classes in reading, writing, and math in grade school. This lays the building blocks to be successful in high school. For those in high school, we provide computer job training skills. For high school dropouts, we provide computer and information technology training for higher paying jobs.
Compliance
United States
We are a registered 5013c with the US IRS and incorporated as a nonprofit in Minnesota.
Guyana
We are also registered in Guyana with the government Friendly Societies Act. Guyana’s Ministry of Education has approved of our curricula and after-school programs. And local governments gave us permission to renovate an abandoned facility and build a new building.
Our Board
We have a small executive board of volunteers that develop our programs to serve the community and our affiliate local churches. In addition, we have a local staff that implement our programs and all of our funding supports local programing and the salaries of local staff. The only funding that is paid out in the US is a part-time administrator that assists Ruth and our board to run and manage our daily operations in Guyana.
Ruth Singh
Founder of Guyanese Outreach
Ruth was born and raised in Guyana. She came to the United States as a student in 1956. After retiring, Ruth Singh founded Guyanese Outreach in 1994. She has spent over 25 years bringing aid to the people in Guyana.
Earl Sigh
CEO and Founder of Guyanese Outreach
Devi Malchan
GO Employee
Devi manages all of the local operations in Guyana. She teaches after-school classes, manages part-time teachers, prepares for students arrival.
Bethany Tritz
GO Administrator
Our History
The Lord gave Ruth Singh the vision to help the poorest of the poor in Guyana as early as 1977. But it wasn’t until 1994 that Ruth accepted that this vision was from the Lord. Back then, poverty was so high that Guyanese Outreach (GO) decided to first address physical needs by sending humanitarian aid. GO sent 2 forty-foot sea containers of medicine, medical equipment, infant incubators, EKG machines, food, clothing and more. GO believes that if a man is hungry, he should be fed. And if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.
In addition to sending humanitarian aid back then, GO also offered unemployed women sewing and craft skills. The Government of Guyana gave GO permission to renovate and use the abandoned Skeldon Primary School Annex to teach sewing/crafts to unemployed women and computer skills to high school students. Later, GO realized illiteracy was very high for high school dropouts. Since it is very difficult for an illiterate high school drop to find a good job, GO started in 2003 its after-school literacy program for grade school with its government-approved curricula. Our public school classes and programs are opened to all, regardless of religion, race or politics.
About Guyana
Guyana is a tropical country situated on the northern coast of South America. It is the only country in South America where English is the official language. It is bordered by Venezuela on the west, Suriname on the east, Brazil on the south and the Atlantic Ocean on the north.
Guyana has an area of 214,969 square kilometers (83,000 sq mi), about the size of Great Britain. The name Guyana is an Amerindian word meaning Land Of Many Waters. Guyana is known as the country of Six People – Africans, Amerindians, Chinese, East Indians, Europeans and Portuguese.
It is where the virgin rainforest leads to the Amazon Basin, where the jungle is still unexplored, rivers uncharted and mountains unclimbed. With over 300 waterfalls, including one of the World’s longest Single drop falls, the stunning Kaieteur at over 700 feet, over 800 species of birds and a wide and unique array of fragrant flora and magnificent fauna, it is an incredibly wonderful land of unspoiled beauty.
This is a land famous for acclaimed poets Martin Carter and A.J. Seymour, internationally acclaimed singer and songwriter Eddie Grant, famous Jazz legend Art Booms, amazing cricketer Clive Lloyd and many others. It is the land where Sir Walter Raleigh searched for El Dorado and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired to write his classic, The Lost World.
Georgetown is the chief port and capital of Guyana. It is situated on the right bank of the Demerara River estuary. In Georgetown, familiar landmarks include the lively Stabroek Market, the sea-wall and the Anglican cathedral of St George, the tallest wooden building in the world.