Direct line to - and in - Haiti

John Stanton

A month after he accepted the U.S. Secretary of State’s Award for Corporate Excellence on behalf of the company he chairs, wireless provider Trilogy International Partners, John Stanton ’77 and the company faced the unimaginable – massive devastation following the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti.

Trilogy International Partners is the largest U.S.-headquartered company operating in Haiti. Stanton has reported that the company's building did not collapse and all employees survived, according to a Thursday Seattle Times article.

Also, within two hours of the quake, Trilogy chartered a plane from Miami, carrying 14 engineers, plus radios, batters and water to work on bringing back its phone infrastructure and restore wireless connection vital for emergency relief work in a country where almost no one has a landline phone.

“We are essential infrastructure on a normal day,” said Stanton, Trilogy’s chairman and a Whitman trustee. “In times of crisis the most important thing is getting our system back on the air.”

The plane landed in Port-au-Prince early Wednesday with help from the U.S. State Department and Kenneth Merten, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti.

Although the wireless service was down for much of Wednesday, local staff and the engineers from Florida worked to get it restored by midnight. Locals in Haiti said people who were trapped under debris have called out for help from their cell phones, the Associated Press reported.

Voilà's network is up and running for domestic and international calls, but 30 percent of the cell sites remain damaged, according to the Times article. With aftershocks, “a bridge there yesterday might not be there tomorrow,” Stanton said.

Trilogy, based in Bellevue, Wash., provides one-third of Haiti's phone connections through its wireless subsidiary Voilà. The company, with 500 employees, is one of the largest employers in Haiti and has operated there for a decade. It won the Award for Corporate Excellence from the U.S. State Department in December for making a positive impact on the Haitian economy.

At the Dec. 9 awards ceremony, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pointed out that the company had “funded over 7,000 primary school scholarships in Haiti making it the largest corporate scholarship sponsor in the country.” The company also provides college scholarships, new internet labs in rural areas and is “helping to develop the social and economic conditions that will move Haiti further down the path to progress,” she said.

The company also has done such things as set up a computer lab in Cite de Soleil, Port-au-Prince’s poorest slum; has built computer labs, water stations, basketball courts and sponsored culture festival and is the corporate partner of musician Wyclef Jean’s foundation that focuses on youth and education.

Stanton said at the ceremony that “as we’ve traveled around the world and provided services in different places, we have a common philosophy — that we deploy a 21st century infrastructure that enables less developed countries to replace older technologies and leapfrog a generation.

“We’re proud of the businesses that we’ve built and we’re even more proud of the teams that we work with that have taken on the opportunities to improve the lives of citizens in the countries in which we provide service,” he said.

“It’s Trilogy’s philosophy to make investments, particularly in education, because we believe that education is fundamentally the civil right opportunity of our generation.”

Stanton, who has a master’s degree in business from Harvard University and co-founded the first large wireless communications company in the United States, McCaw Cellular Communications, before forming his own wireless companies, still credits
Whitman College and the liberal arts education he received as the foundation for his success.

“While I’ve got a graduate degree in business, I would tell you that the things I learned at Whitman College were far more important to my development in my business career and the things I’ve been able to do in the community,” Stanton said.