Zero Overhead, Full Return

Most executives know the real story never fits in the quarterly report. The same is true of COMFE (Asociación Ministerio Compasión y Fe) in Honduras.

Elvin Cerna, COMFE founder, runs an organization with zero overhead. He and his family hold day jobs to support themselves, and his 12 staff are all volunteers. Every dollar of your $16,000 RetailROI grant in 2025 went straight to work in western Honduras.

The scale is remarkable for an all-volunteer team. Each month, COMFE feeds 120 widows through its Golden Age Project and 68 orphaned children through its Orphan Project, nearly double the 37 it served previously.

Your $10,000 for COMFE homes provided food, school supplies, and housing assistance. Near La Entrada, families live on the municipal dump in tin shacks with no plumbing, and about 150 children there receive food each month. Elvin's offer to parents is simple: send your child to school, and receive a week of rice, corn, and basic necessities for every week they attend. Now children sit in a classroom instead of rummaging through a trash heap.

Your $6,000 funded APACAP, which gives 120 farming families seeds and fertilizer to grow their own food. Some communities go further, granting a family land and a cow. A third of the harvest feeds the family, a third is sold, and a third returns to the community, along with the first calf, which starts the next family. Thirty-five families are already farming their land, with fathers at home instead of leaving for the cartels or the border.

The unit economics are clear. About 2,450 lempiras (roughly $90) feeds a family of four for a week, and about 1,225 lempiras (roughly $45) feeds two orphans. Rising food prices have pushed COMFE to focus on essential staples, so every additional dollar matters.

John Geyerman of WOWorks has traveled to Honduras with RetailROI for more than a decade, most recently this September with founder Greg Buzek. "It's the context all around the picture," John says, "that you get when you go physically."

That context prompts returns no proposal could. On one trip, a Google employee offered 20 Chromebooks for a partner's computer lab on the spot. This time, Greg saw a village school of 14 children with no bathrooms in 90-degree heat. A proper building would cost $20,000, and it is now a grant opportunity.

The next generation is investing too. John's daughter Paige, a marketer, joined him last year and discovered that COMFE's donation link asked donors for a Honduran bank routing number. She rebuilt the website and set up COMFE email so Elvin, who speaks only Spanish, could share his work with English-speaking donors. On this trip, she returned to gather new stories and photos. Travel like this does not come easily to Paige, and John says simply getting on the plane was a big deal. That she chose to go back anyway says everything about what she found there: a way to put her professional gifts to work for someone who truly needs them.

Paige was following her older sister's lead. John first brought his daughter Sydnee to Honduras when she was 16, and she couldn't wait to go back, returning every year for five years. John says the experience gave her a new perspective on how much she already had.

Next summer, RetailROI returns to Honduras on a trip designed for leaders to bring their teenagers. Consider this your personal invitation to come see where your investment goes, and what it could do next.

Reserve your adventure today.