Actor Sean Penn received the Hollywood Humanitarian Award for his work in Haiti, one of the first big celebrity names to attend to the crisis.

In the early days of the Haiti Earthquake there was a lack of coordination between aid agencies and government to help victims of the disaster. While people around the world donated in record numbers, aid agencies where getting turned away from the badly damaged airport in Port Au Prince. Smaller charities were initially able to make life saving aid donations across the Dominican Republic, as both air and sea aid was at a standstill.

Sean Penn went to Haiti to help on the ground with a team from his organization JPHRO Foundation and with the Fuller Center for Housing Foundation.

The actor, who criticized, although carefully, Wyclef Jean's presidential bid, was one of the face s of the crisis in entertainment, and showed people what was happening on the ground, and calling for supporters to come down and help out.

Hollywood Humanitarian Award acceptance speech.

Below is an extract of Sean Penn s speech about receiving the Award :

It is Haiti where foreign aid and environmental technical revolution for the first time has a palpable chance of being the epicenter, the example of humanitarian success when we in the Unites States use an energy saving bulb, we see in the mirror our own impatience as we wait for it to warm up to full brightness. Remember that the Haitians never had a bulb in the first place, and they will invite their extended families to celebrate in the patience of the miracle of developing brightness. Bring the technology to Haiti. Bring some of those jobs to Haiti.
Haiti deserves our focus. They are our neighbor, and in my core I believe that these if they are allowed to fall an hour and a half from our shores we can begin to count our own days. - Looktothestars