Even as stories of gang violence and political instability dominate the news about Haiti, life goes on for the millions of Haitians who get up every day and courageously live their lives even when they don’t know what tomorrow will bring. During this difficult period,  we’re excited to share that we have welcomed 10 new university students into our program, thanks to our new partnership with our friends at Higher Education and Leadership Program for Haiti (HELP for Haiti).  The 2024-25 academic year for universities in Jeremie is starting this month, and each of these scholarship recipients is receiving the life-changing opportunity to attend university, connect with a personal mentor, and access electricity/internet at the Thrive Ansanm resource center because of this partnership.

We first connected with HELP for Haiti when my wife Bethany and I attended Haitian Creole language school in 2020. There we met Jeanne Otis, HELP president, and Chip Cain, HELP vice president, who happened to be visiting. We discovered that we shared the same mission to empower young people in Haiti through education, and over the past few years, we’ve stayed in touch. This past summer, we entered into a formal partnership that will help us reach more young people in Haiti. 

HELP for Haiti was inspired by the work of the late Coley Gorham and his wife Anna. Coley first visited Haiti in 1998 when he was already 80 years old. He could have easily concluded that he was too old to travel to a politically unstable and underdeveloped country. But after watching a video of the poor conditions in Haiti, he felt compelled to go and see for himself. A man of action, Coley spent the next 20 years working along with his wife Anna to empower young people in Haiti through education, raising money and visiting Haiti many times. When he died at the age of 102 in December 2020, he had impacted the lives of many young Haitians, but he still felt that his work in Haiti was left unfinished. 

Coley in Haiti with his young friend Romain who is now studying administrative science at the University of the Aristide Foundation through a HELP scholarship.

During his last trip to Haiti in 2016, Coley, then 97 years old, was joined by Jeanne who was his foot care nurse. Inspired by Coley’s vision, Jeanne, Chip, and a few other founding board members subsequently formed HELP for Haiti, a 501c3 organization committed to continuing the work that Coley started by helping more Haitian students access higher education. 

The HELP team continues to be committed to this mission, but the last few years have been difficult. Most of their team is in the States, and it’s generally unsafe to travel to Haiti because of the insecurity, so it became increasingly challenging for them to manage logistics on the ground even though they wanted to help more students. Meanwhile, we are here in Jeremie, Haiti with a committed team of local staff, but we are overwhelmed by the many students in our community requesting scholarships because we only have the means to help a select few. Thus, we each have strengths and weaknesses, but we believe that moving forward we can reach more students together by sharing our knowledge and resources.

Now, our team at Thrive Ansanm manages payments and logistics for Help for Haiti scholarship recipients, and these students also receive the added benefit of a Thrive Ansanm mentor and access to our resource center in Jeremie. And it is only through the generosity of HELP that 10 bright, young students here in Jeremie are now starting their university education.

For me personally, as the Executive Director and Co-founder of Thrive Ansanm, I am deeply grateful for this new partnership. Many people in our community are suffering, and the economic situation has only worsened over the last few years. Yet, because we have limited means, we have to turn more people away than we can help. At times, this is overwhelming, and I know that Maillard, our country director, born and raised in Jeremie, feels the same way. 

We were feeling bad because we didn’t have the means to add new students this year, but HELP for Haiti stepped up, and through this partnership, we’re helping 10 new students for the 2024-25 academic year. I feel a special connection and gratitude to Coley, even though I never had the chance to meet him. At an age when no one would have blamed him if he decided that working in Haiti was more than he could take on, he chose to dedicate the remaining season of his life to helping young people get an education. If he had chosen an easier path, our partnership with HELP for Haiti would not exist.

I am confident that Thrive Ansanm and HELP for Haiti will reach many more students together than we ever could have reached alone. As we say at Thrive Ansanm, together “ansanm” we can empower young people in Haiti to thrive.