 
New York Assemblywoman Sandra Galef presents citation to honoree Roger Sitkins at the Bridges to Community gala last month.
The first time Mark Rollins led a group of business professionals on a trip to Nicaragua to build homes was 2004.
During the weeklong trip to a small village, the volunteers slept on dormitory-style cots with mosquito nets, ate rice and beans and built two houses from the ground up, side-by-side with the families who will be living in them.
Since then, Rollins has led 14 trips of business professionals to the country through the Ossining-based nonprofit Bridges to Community.Â
 “I recruited a fair number of key business executives from Westchester County to come down, and what I found dramatic was the transformation that they all went through was very similar to the one that I went through the first time,” said Rollins, president and CEO of the Rollins Agency in Tuckahoe. “You could spin the globe and find thousands of places that need help, and many of those places are within 10 miles of here, but what I found interesting about the Bridges experience is that deep down inside, you feel a need to give back and make the world a better place, including right in your own village here in New York.”
Founded in 1992, the organization”™s first trip, during which a well and wash basin was built, was “to build solidarity with the people of Nicaragua,” according to Kevin Mestrich, Bridges”™ executive director.
“We”™re now taking 800 to 900 volunteers every year, including high school groups and universities, faith-based groups and business professionals, which started growing in 2004 with Mark,” Mestrich said. “Since that time, our partnerships with business leaders have grown to account for about 35 percent of our trips. We”™re now growing more nationally, particularly our business groups.”
Rollins has recruited business leaders through his association with Canada-based Sitkins International, an organization comprised of independent insurance agents.
“Mark has really been the catalyst in getting our business professional groups going, and he”™s reached out not only through his network, but through the Westchester County Association and has gotten a number of professionals to go on trips,” Mestrich said.
Roger Sitkins, president of Sitkins International, was the recipient of the Bridges”™ 2009 Outstanding Vision and Commitment to Action Award.
“You”™d think we”™d just cured cancer, but we only built a few one-room cinder block houses in a Nicaraguan village,” Sitkins said at the nonprofit”™s annual spring gala last month. “The people we meet on our trips change our lives more than we change theirs.”
The gala raised $150,000 for the organization, which last year had a budget of $2.4 million. The biggest source of funds comes from volunteer participants who go on trips, which covers 60 to 70 percent of the organization”™s costs, Mestrich said. The other 30 to 40 percent comes from fundraising.
There are five staff in the United States; most of the staff is in Nicaragua.
Mestrich said Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Western hemisphere, next to Haiti, and “by all demographic figures it”™s one of the neediest countries on this side of the world.”
Bridges is involved in four program areas: health, education, housing and infrastructure and economic development.
“Each year, we try to build 100 houses,” Mestrich said. “On the side of education, we do everything from providing scholarships for colleges and universities to sponsoring entire classrooms of children in primary schools to running a computer school and maintaining it. On the side of health care, we run medical brigades, mainly with fourth-year medical students, who go down there and are able to provide medical services in communities where people have no access to health care.”
In terms of economic development, “through small-income loans and microfinancing schemes we are able to give them some form of income generation that could sustain them as well as their families.”
For participants, Bridges to Community is a total immersion experience. After returning from a trip, the lessons business leaders learn from the Nicaraguan people tend to stay with them.
“You see the kids in the morning on their way to school, and it”™s almost a miracle that these kids come out of these dirt-floor shacks that are 10-by-12 feet and house a mom and dad and three kids, but the kids come out somehow in the morning with a white crisp shirt on, hair combed back, navy blue pants or a skirt, and they walk down the dirt road to school,” Rollins said. “They”™re such proud people. A lot of what happens down there are the lessons that we learn from them that we bring back up here.”
