Team

The Max Foundation seeks to prevent child mortality with small-scale water projects in Bangladesh. Micro-sanitation, the combination of providing clean water, latrines, and education is the most effective and efficient way to fight simple but lethal diseases like diarrhea and give children a future. The Max Foundation provides micro-sanitation in Bangladesh together with the local community.

Steven Le Poole: Founder/Chair.
Steven is co-founder of Potosi BV an investment and consultancy. Via this company, he led Axon for 2 years as CEO, a company that specializes in signal conversion apparatus for TV studios. Steven’s motto is that development work requires a businesslike approach based on basic facilities. Investing in clean drinking water delivers the best results.

Joke Le Poole: Founder/Contact for donors
Joke works as a self employed advisor/project manager in the area of innovative supply chain projects at Numico and Heineken. Joke worked for 9 years as (among other things) innovation manager and supply chain consultant. As well as Max, Joke and Steven have two sons, Bas and Friso.

Jasper: Treasurer
Jasper works as a manager at ABN AMRO. In this function he has spent 3 months in India advising on micro credit projects. “The issues in India are similar to those in Bangladesh. Involvement of the local community is an essential criterion for everything you do there. Immediately establishing collaboration with the local community gives the project a face but more importantly it is the basis for continuity of implementation. It is a tragedy to see projects fail because of a poor links with the local community.”

Joris van Liebergen: Donor recruitment
Joris works for his own company, Grondwerk Projectmanagers, as project manager on road and waterways projects. In the past he has worked for a number of years in Bangladesh on development projects such as fresh water projects in dry areas. “The people in the villages are sincerely grateful for the simplest of facilities. With a water well and latrines it is possible for them to make the next step in their development. It is therefore great that the Max Foundation invests 100% of the donations directly in the facilities for them.”

Nathalie Besseling: Secretary
Nathalie works as an assistant at Heineken International in the Commercial department. “It starts early in the morning under the shower, then with a cup of tea and it goes on like that. You use water through the entire day without even thinking about it. It’s different in many parts of the world. Contributing to improving the quality of drinking water in such an effective and durable way gives me lots of energy!”

Martine Sickinghe: Correspondence
Between 1993 and1996 Martine worked at Booz Allen and Hamilton. After that she worked as a stewardess for KLM. Martine is mother to Milou, Eger, and Rein. “It’s indescribable to see during our trips to Bangladesh that children are no longer dying of diarrhea and cholera since our water wells. It is unacceptable that people still die from drinking dirty water. An entire village with a few hundred inhabitants can have drinking water for just €350.”

Willem Rogge: Volunteer
Willem works as an independent communications adviser for energy, real estate companies and social organizations. “I have seen that people have lost their confidence in the larger charity organizations but that they still want to do something to help. Adopting a water well is concrete and simple. What you see is what you get. This also counts for the people in Bangladesh who have to collect €100 themselves.”

Hubert Linssen: Volunteer
Hubert works as a process engineer at Shell Global Solutions in Amsterdam. Here he works on developing gas instillations that convert coal, oil and biomaterials into clean (sulphur free) fuel. “One in six people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water, while where I live it is taken for granted. I want to try to do something about this. The thing that appeals to me about the Max Foundation is that we can help in an effective and transparent way.”