SAIPAN – Ayuda Foundation founder Carlotta De Leon Guerrero said Wednesday that the Saipan volunteers who mobilized through her Guam-based nonprofit after Super Typhoon Sinlaku want to stay together and build a permanent local disaster response, a structural shift the foundation does not typically support but one she has committed to back.
In an interview on Good Morning Marianas, De Leon Guerrero said the Ayuda Foundation usually phases out of a response as donations slow and federal assistance arrives, but that the Saipan team has signaled it wants to write grants, raise funds from the diaspora and operate as a Red Cross-style local entity.
“I feel like I’m the skeletal structure,” she said. “Ayuda Foundation is a skeletal structure that they are getting to grow off of.”
De Leon Guerrero said the Saipan volunteers, a coalition that includes veterans groups, environmental advocates and other community organizations, recognize that the CNMI has been hit by three super typhoons in 11 years and need to remain in a state of readiness.
She said she has committed to mentor the Saipan team and is sharing the operational playbook that built Ayuda Foundation over 31 years, including how to source large medication orders and respond to water and food security crises across Micronesia.
The foundation is also preparing two new water-production capabilities. Samaritan’s Purse has donated two reverse osmosis machines to Ayuda Foundation, each capable of producing approximately 10,000 gallons of drinking water per day. De Leon Guerrero said a team is training on the equipment with Samaritan’s Purse personnel and that one machine will be deployed to Chuuk, where the current U.S.-supported response is producing roughly 2,000 gallons per day. The plan, she said, is to place the system on a ship and run it out to outer atolls to refill catchments and tanks.
Ayuda Foundation has also purchased emergency health kits through Medicine for All People, a New Brunswick, Georgia-based nonprofit. The kits, designed for refugee camps and disaster zones, carry enough medication to serve 10,000 people for 90 days or 30,000 people for 30 days. De Leon Guerrero said one allotment is destined for the Commonwealth Healthcare Corporation and a second for Chuuk State Hospital, but both shipments remain stuck in commercial freight backlogs. She said she is exploring military airlift options.
The Saipan operation is run out of a warehouse coordinated by Ayuda Foundation field representative Kai Murrell, whom De Leon Guerrero said she first identified as a disaster logistics talent during Soudelor response work on Guam. Project Buddy Check 670 and several other Saipan-based volunteer groups share that warehouse for their Sinlaku recovery operations.
De Leon Guerrero said a Samaritan’s Purse staff member, Mark Lopshire, called her to praise the young CNMI volunteers who reported to the warehouse to cut plastic sheeting into tarps.
“I have never met a more professional and admirable, committed, passionate and focused group of young people in my life,” she quoted him as saying.
The Ayuda Foundation traces its origins to her tenure as a Guam senator in the mid-1990s, when she founded the organization to fulfill a medical mission commitment carried over from former Senator and Delegate Madeleine Bordallo. The foundation’s formal name reflects that history. The legal name is Continental Micronesia, Inc. Association Pacific Island Legislatures Micronesia Medical Mission Foundation, doing business as the Ayuda Foundation.
De Leon Guerrero has previously incubated other regional nonprofits to independence, including Island Girl Power and the Micronesian Conservation Coalition led by Julie Hartup.
She also has CNMI media roots. De Leon Guerrero said she was recruited from a Guam cable news producer role to launch what became MCB, the CNMI’s first local news station, by Larry Hillblom and Joe Waechter.
De Leon Guerrero closed with a message to CNMI residents.
“Guam loves you,” she said.