About 33 mission teams have traveled from the United States to work in the Episcopal Diocese of the Dominican Republic to date in 2019. The Mission Team Coordination Office in the diocesan headquarters building in Santo Domingo is dedicated to the support of the travel and the projects of these mission teams. The Dominican Development Group works in close cooperation with this office to facilitate the planning of logistics and the transfer of funds needed to pay for in-country meals and lodging, transportation, and program supplies such as construction materials. 

This Mission Team Coordination Office is currently staffed by Miquea Santivil Luis, a bilingual Dominican who has several years of experience working with mission teams; and by Charlie Nakash, a full-time Appointed Missionary from the Diocese of New Jersey who is also bilingual and who specializes in coordinating construction projects. Patricia Martin, who worked with this program for several years and led the office for over a year after the retirement of Missionary Karen Carroll, has left the diocesan staff but remains active in other diocesan lay ministry programs. 

The email address for this office has changed to <missionteam@iglepidom.org>. The contact telephone number remains the same: (809) 688-6016 extension 24. Any messages sent to the former email address, <drequipos@gmail.com>, will be automatically forwarded to the new email address. Please discontinue use of the former address, since eventually it will become inactive.

At this time, this mission team coordination office is in a restructuring process, so additional support for the office and its programs is being provided by the Rt. Rev. Moisés Quezada Mota (mquezada@iglepidom.org) and  his executive assistant, Charlene Baez ( aobispo@iglepidom.org ).

The Board of Directors of the Dominican Development Group met from 10:00 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. on Monday, September 23, 2019. Members participated from widespread locations that included the Dominican Republic, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia using the Zoom online video and audio conferencing platform. 

A set of reports and other documents associated with this meeting are available online here, and more will be added as they are submitted. An article about the meeting will be in the December 2019 issue of the DDG's bilingual magazine, Compañeros Dominicanos. 

At this time, key documents online include the following:

-- Minutes of the meeting of February 11, 2019

--  Report of the Executive Director

-- Current Financial Statement

-- Report of the Mission Team Coordination Office

-- Report on the Fund for Self-Sustainability - Report |  Notes

-- Report of the Communications Committee

-- Resolutions honoring the life and work of two of the founders of the Dominican Development Group who died earlier this year: David Morrow and Bob Stevens. 

In addition to helping coordinate trips by mission teams to the Dominican Republic, the Dominican Development Group also sponsors pilgrimage trips twice each year. These pilgrimage trips (formerly called exploration trips) are designed to familiarize mission team leaders and others interested in the ministries and facilities of the Diocese of the Dominican Republic with many of those locations in a fast-paced, week-long trip that begins and ends at the Las American International Airport east of Santo Domingo. In even years, the general path of these trips follows a south-to-north direction, including several Episcopal facilities on the north-central coast of the Dominican Republic. In odd years such as 2019, the path is generally west to east, including the Episcopal church, school, and medical clinic located in the city of Jimaní on the border with Haiti. The next scheduled exploration trip is planned for November 14-20, 2019. For a information flyer on this trip,  click here . For an application form for this trip,  click here . The deadline for registering for this trip is October 15, 2019. For more information on pilgrimage trips, contact Bill Kunkle, DDG Executive Director, at (813) 400-2722 or < bkunkle@dominicandevelopmentgroup.org >.