Transforming the future of Haiti by empowering women and girls
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Ayiti se Bel!
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We are committed to using our privileges and voices to stand with peers in northern Haiti.
We support local initiatives relating to healthcare, wellbeing, and education.
We will do what it takes to make a sustainable and measurable difference.
Along the way, we will learn to work from indigenous values, and decenter ourselves.
This is how we R.I.I.S.E, together.
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Whatever the weather in northern Haiti, people are outside, on the move. People are walking to market on mountain paths, skipping to school, crossing rivers with shoes in hand, tearing around corners on motos, and selling anything from gum to furniture on the side of the road. More often than not, the sun shines on the whole of the small island nation. Yet, not even a hard rain disrupts the routine and vibrant practices of getting to–and through–the day. One cannot pass by a main road without noting the pulse of the region: rapid, driving, hopeful. The urgency and richness of Haiti’s streets are fully part of the climate. There is an ever-present sense that life is happening right here, right now. Northern Haiti, centered largely around the nation’s third largest city–Cap Haitien–is dynamic, beautiful, and storied. The Department of the North (du Nò) has a population of just over one million people (in a nation of 11 million) and stretches along the northern coast of the western third of Hispaniola. Haiti is the most mountainous of the West Indian islands, and while one may be traversing roads that are impossibly rutted and bumpy, one does so between the Atlantic shoreline, serene bays, and rugged mountains. Given its size, middle of the road amongst Haiti’s ten Departments, it possesses an outsized history, and remains the heart of the origin story of Haiti, which we cover in Chapter One. Today, the du Nò, specifically, Okap or Cap-Haitien, is known for folk arts and relative stability amidst the chaos of what is the worst challenge to Haitian democracy since the fear and confusion of Duvalierism, led first by François Duvalier (1957-1971) or Papa Dok and later his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, or Baby Dok. Northern Haiti seems to balance contradictions that allow it to turn chaos into something meaningful, or at least that is what we see when we look at Haiti through the lens of change agents and leaders who have crafted a vision for a bright future that includes ordinary Haitians and is based upon indigenous values. It is possible to turn chaos into something beautiful, and the people whose stories we tell herein show us this truth.