Biography of the CEO
Valentin Sandaire was born in Port-à-Piment a small village in the southern part of Haiti, He is the Senior Pastor of First Haitian Evangelical Church of Queens, and Co-founder of Temple of Refuge in Brooklyn, New York. He has been in the ministry for over eighteen years. He is also the author of the amazing book “From Nothing to Prominence “. Valentin Sandaire is the founder of City of Refuge International Rescue Mission a 501 C3 organization established to serve and help the elderly around the Queens community.
Pastor Valentin has received a diploma in Biblical Study from FGBI, BA from Illinois Baptist College and attended Maranatha Baptist University MA in Christian Counseling. He and his wife, Edeline, live in Brooklyn with their two daughters Anaiah & Isabella Sandaire.
In addition to being and entrepreneur, he is also a philanthropist, he genuinely cares for people around him and he is always doing his best to provide for those in need around him. He is someone who loves God, and this is where he gets his strength and motivation from.
Story
Ever since I was a child, I had a weak spot for the elderly. It all started with my mother. When I was a child, my mother used to be very poor. She worked very hard to pay my school fees and ensured that I had a good education. She used to push me to read, memorize my lessons, and made sure that I got good grades.
One day after a late night at work, my mother came home and asked me to memorize my lessons, that is when I realized that she was holding the book upside down and that my mother didn’t know how to read.
It had such a powerful impact on me that I was motivated to help elderly people get a second chance in life just because my mother didn’t have one. I then realized that there are times when a person would love to learn to read, but as life goes on responsibilities take over and they have no time to go back to school and learn to read.
Growing up, I always felt accustomed to the company of adults. I remember I was always more mature than the other children at school. My best friends used to be way older than me. I had an elderly friend who lost everything he had when the recession hit in 2007. He couldn’t take care of his family and was evicted from his home. The stress made him sick, and his wife divorced him later on. He started sleeping in the streets under the bridge, as the winter approached it became too difficult for him to sleep outside. To save himself from the cold he broke into an abandoned house to sleep. He was later found dead because of the extreme cold. I concluded that providing shelter for the homeless, the elders shouldn’t be something conditional or occasional.
Few years down, I learned another lesson on how our elderly are lonely and end up spending their last days in their homes without a soul nearby. This is another story that has stayed with me all these years. It is about a company I used to work with. When Covid-19 hit in 2020, people started dying we used to send someone every 3 days to take care of the elderly people. There was this customer who was an amazing lady, but she had no family at all. She was 85 years and used to live by herself. That lady got infected somehow and passed away in her home. It was until after 3 days, when the aid came, they found her dead in the house.
It is because of this incident that I am passionate to take care of elders. New York is full of people and someone, somewhere may be dying alone.