Schools Not Slavery for Rural Haitian Children

You Are Making Schools & Communities Healthier, Safer, More Hopeful Places for Children

Because so much of a child’s life is shaped by what happens outside the classroom too, your support for Schools Not Slavery is helping to transform the entire community, making it a healthier, safer, and more hopeful place for children.

Having just completed the third year of the Schools Not Slavery initiative on Lagonav Island, we are very grateful for the progress that schools and communities are making - thanks to the support of donors like you.

Freeing Children and Reuniting Them with Their Families

Overall, the communities in which Schools Not Slavery is at work have been able to free and reintegrate 63 percent of children who had been sent away and were trapped in servitude.

Achieving Universal Primary Education in Rural Communities

Additionally, in the last 24-month period, four out of five communities in which the Schools Not Slavery initiative was launched in 2015 achieved universal primary education, stopping the flow of children out of their communities into servitude, and reducing the indicators of discrimination and exploitation of children living apart from their parents to essentially zero (see attached chart on enrollment gains by community). These achievements are changing the lives of boys and girls like Lo-Richama, a sixth-grader at Jean Marie School in Tipalmis - one of the newest schools to join the Schools Not Slavery network. Lo-Richama is growing up at home with her family, free from slavery and abuse, and she's getting a quality education - all because of the generosity of supporters like you. Thank you so much for your care and concern for vulnerable children like Lo-Richama in rural Haiti! 

What Your Support Makes Possible

Here are some of the school and community-based initiatives made possible by your support for Schools Not Slavery:

- Helping parents find and free children they’ve sent away and organizing communities to stop the flow of children into slavery through our six-month Child Rights Training and the creation of neighborhood Child Protection Brigades,

- Training teachers in nonviolent, participatory classroom management techniques,

- Creating school textbook banks to provide affordable book rentals for every student,

- Supporting tuition matching programs for parents who can’t pay their child’s full tuition,

- Launching school gardens to teach children about agriculture and provide food for meals at school,

- Supporting adult literacy training, agricultural training, small business training, and seed and tool banks to help struggling rural families lift themselves out of poverty (see attached newsletter article for an in-depth report), and,

- Training and organizing community members to prevent violence against women and girls.

Expanding Schools Not Slavery to More Communities on Lagonav Island

In fiscal year 2018, the Schools Not Slavery initiative will be expanding on Lagonav Island to reach a total of 14 communities where vulnerable children and families live.

Mobilizing Diverse Local Leadership to Create Lasting Change in Communities

In every community where Schools Not Slavery works, we proactively include every local institution and individual as a means to build trust and collaboration and create lasting change.

Many external initiatives to help Haitian communities funnel their efforts through a single local church, school, organization, or individual leader. This approach often ends up alienating or excluding large segments of the community, though, and can increase divisions and distrusts, as power shifts to the local partner in ways that exclude broader leadership and accountability to the community.

Those who already feel excluded in a community are often reluctant to participate. They may feel ashamed or worry that they'll be shunned if they show up. Schools Not Slavery employs a range of strategies to win the participation of the excluded, and, just as important, to help every participant to progressively show up with those parts of themselves that they’ve excluded.

Give With Confidence

We are committed to transparency and accountability at all levels, and we are proud to have been named as 'One of the Best Small Nonprofits' in the 2017-18 Greater Washington Catalogue for Philanthropy. On our website you'll find:

- our seven most-recent audited financial statements,

- our seven most-recent IRS Form 990 filings, and,

- our Donor Privacy Policy.

If you have any questions about how your support for Schools Not Slavery is used, please contact us anytime at (202) 686-2088. Thank you for your trust, your generosity, and your concern for vulnerable children in Haiti.

Links:

• See Updates Direct from Haiti on our Facebook Page
• See a Google Map of the Schools Not Slavery Initiative

• SNS Helps Families Move from Poverty to Dignity. (PDF)
  

We are so grateful for your generous gift to Schools Not Slavery. Your support means girls and boys in nine rural communities on Lagonav Island are safe, free, and enrolled in quality schools.

In 2016, 104 children were freed from slavery, reunited with their parents, and enrolled in school thanks to supporters like you.

Children whose parents can't afford to send them to school face the highest risk of being sent in to slavery. Your support enrolls kids in a school near where they live and helps improve the quality of those schools.

Today, thanks to supporters like you, more than 3,500 rural children are getting a quality education from well-trained teachers who care. That's because all 35 schools in the Schools Not Slavery Network are implementing a six-point strategy to boost the capacity of teachers and enhance the learning environment for every student.

This strategy for educational excellence was pioneered by our long-time partners at the Matènwa Community Learning Center and is proven to produce reading scores that are nearly three times better than the national average, according to a 2014 MIT study. It includes:

1. Native Language Instruction – Students are taught in Haitian Creole, the language they speak at home, instead of French, which is introduced later in the classroom, as a second language.
2. Participatory Approach to Classroom Management – This approach fosters intellectual curiosity and critical thinking skills and encourages students to write stories in Haitian Creole about their own lives and share them with each other.
3. Non-Violent Classroom Management – Teachers use a non-violent approach to classroom management that teaches students leadership and democracy.
4. Textbook Banks – Textbook banks ensure every student has the textbooks they need to be a successful learner.
5. Accelerated Education – Students who miss out on starting school at age six either because their parents were too poor to pay tuition fees OR because they were sent away to live with others and work as household servants can catch up on the learning they missed through an Accelerated Education program.
6. Education Rooted in Rural Life - At every school agriculture is integrated into almost every aspect of the curriculum, teaching students agricultural science and improved farming techniques that they can share with their families, like how to produce higher crop yields and minimize the impact of drought and deforestation.

Your generous support for Schools Not Slavery makes this kind of high-quality education possible for girls and boys in rural Haiti and greatly reduces their risk of being sent away in to slavery. Thank you so much for your care and concern for vulnerable children in Haiti. We are grateful for your support!

Links:

• Watch a video about school gardens.

• School Gardens help parents feed their children. (PDF)
  
• Teachers are trained in nonviolent classroom mgmt. (PDF)