Haitian Creole is a fairly young language, aging between 200 and 300 years old. While there is much overlap with French, it is a completely different language. However, there is a severe lack of educational materials in the Creole language. While some institutions like Educa Vision have developed an array of books in Haitian Creole, there is a strong lack of educational videos and other such resources available online for educators. We have started developing short videos in Creole that simply teach varying important topics. A huge thanks to Virginia Tech professors Kim Carlson and Angela Anderson for engaging their students in this project. If you are an educator that would like to collaborate on a similar project, please email GrassrootsSchools@gmail.com.

Here are some videos we have done so far. Many more to come! We hope that educators teaching Haitian Creole speaking students find them useful:

The importance of clean water:

The scientific method:

Energy and its different sources:

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle:

We recently obtained thousands of shirts from Altagracia Apparel, a living wage t-shirt company in the Dominican Republic that is closing its doors. These t-shirts have small imperfections: a tiny hole or two in the seams or a stray mark. We doctor these shirts up, making each one perfectly imperfect and unique, and embroider the word stitched at the bottom. We then resell them to support our schools. We sell them in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic through volunteers in the U.S., and online here: https://www.goodfruitdesigns.com/product-page/stitched-t-shirt

We normally embroider these shirts in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, but the recent supply was already in the U.S. Therefore, we have volunteer embroiderers around the country on the task! Morehouse College Bonner students are the only group so far that has agreed to sell on their campus.

If you would like to embroider or sell, please contact GoodFruitDesigns@gmail.com. We hope to start a bit of a trend for a great cause! Funds earned go directly into the hands of educators with a proven track record of dedication to their schools. The first recipient is Maroquee Community School in Maroquee, Haiti. The goal is to be able to send $1,000 US per month to this highly deserving school.

Thanks for caring! And thank you to the Carpenter family in North Carolina whose house was recently taken over by boxes of t-shirts!

Kidnappings in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, have increased lately with political turmoil surrounding disagreement over the end of the presidential term of President Jovenel Moise. Despite the fact that Haiti is closer to many parts of the US, such as Florida, than Florida is to states on the West coast, this situation doesn’t often make it into North American news. Perhaps the general public thinks that the situation is “hopeless”, remembering that UN troops have occupied the country various times previously to try to create order and peace. What else could the international community do to help create change?

We’ve been thinking and talking seriously amongst our team about just that.

The idea we’d like to move forward with is a large scale effort to get funds and materials into the hands of educators in Haiti, specifically what is known as the biggest slum in the Western Hemisphere: Cite Soleil. We aren’t expecting it to go completely smoothly, but we are expecting efforts to improve gradually over time as has been our experience. If this is not done on a large scale, it may be made impossible and put people in danger, as kidnapping is rampant and anyone receiving funds could become a target. However, we believe that if this is done on a large scale, it will create a new reward, new hope, and new opportunity for everyone.

If you already work in Cite Soleil or are from Cite Soleil, we would love to hear from you! Tens of millions of dollars were raised for the family of George Floyd because the majority of Americans believe that black lives matter. Or is it Black lives matter? Does this include non-Americans?

You may doubt that this game plan is viable. We would love to hear from you too. Let’s talk. Write to grassrootsschools@gmail.com.

Project Esperanza has been empowering education initiatives in the Dominican Republic since 2006. We call the schools we began supporting and now run “grassroots schools” as they are all founded by locals who are burdened by the country’s failure to educate their youth. It has been our greatest desire to give these locals the tools they need to take matters into their own hands. However, Project Esperanza as an organization cannot take on the responsibility of all of the educators who contact us, who have made sacrifices in order to run little schools on no pay, who daily buy snacks for their students out of their pocket money, and who scrounge up collections from parents in order to buy books. We can, however, share what we have learned so that others can take responsibility over such initiatives. We can also offer a registered non-profit through which sponsors and educators can unite.

The mission of Grassroots Schools Global Affiliates is to provide organizational materials and a pathway to connect educational initiatives around the world with sponsors who believe in education and wish to support such initiatives. The materials and pathway we provide ensure optimum transparency and communication between sponsors, school faculty, and parents of students. If you have been looking for a way to get your grassroots educational initiative supported or to empower a local third world community, you have come to the right place.