Quixote Center’s work in Haiti prioritizes systemic change. Our theory of change has three aspects:

  • Economic development initiatives that lead to meaningful and sustainable jobs and income for families and communities;
  • Reforestation to preserve Haiti’s environment and protect the soil and watershed;
  • Advocacy to promote US policies that support Haitian democracy and Haitian-led solutions to poverty, gang violence, and migration.

     

Gros Morne and Grepen

Quixote Center partners with the Montfortain Fathers for a variety of projects in the Gros Morne area. Historically we have supported the Jean Marie Vincent Formation Center, which houses a tree nursery, a model instructional garden and multiple classrooms for training small-scale farmers. With our support, the JMV Center also maintains the Tet Mon model forest, a reforestation project that is the only one of its kind in the region. The JMV team holds formation sessions on reforestation and tree maintenance for local leaders, schoolchildren, and agronomy students.

 

Quixote Center also partners with the Montfortain-led LaChandle parish to support displaced people who fled to the Gros Morne area as a result of internal violence or deportations. With our support, the parish has sponsored programs to keep children in school and provide child-safe spaces to prevent gang recruitment. We have also provided cash assistance for the parents so that they can start small businesses and stabilize their income.

Developpement Communautaire Chretien Haitien (DCCH)

DCCH, a member of Caritas, partnered with Quixote Center in 2023 to conduct a needs assessment among rural communities around Les Cayes to identify investment priorities. After consulting with hundreds of community members through interviews and focus groups, together we designed a project that provides targeted investments in agroecological training, animal care, and women empowerment through microloans and small business ventures.  In 2025, we launched the Socio-Economic Recovery Program as a scalable and replicable pilot project working with 100 rural families reaching up to 1000 people. This community-led initiative aims to improve their income and food security while building resilience and eliminating dependence on outside assistance.  DCCH distributes seeds and livestock as loans where recipients return the same quantity of seeds and the first offspring to the program for redistribution. In 2026 we included an additional 100 families. 

Read the final report from the 2025 pilot . 

The song remains the same: The United States in Haiti this week

Fri, 07/23/2021 - 1:44pm by Tom

This week a new interim government was established in Haiti and the United States appointed a special envoy to represent US interests in the effort to move forward on elections, provide security and to offer support for the investigation into Moise’s assassination. Along the way, the Biden administration demonstrated once again the inability of the US government to listen to anybody standing outside the echo chamber clamoring about the indispensable role of the United States in finding a solution.

Law school clinics at Harvard, Yale and NYU call on Biden to denounce controversial constitutional referendum

Tue, 06/08/2021 - 3:48pm by Tom

The Moise government in Haiti has once again postponed a controversial constitutional referendum. The chair of the electoral counsel announced on Monday, June 7 that the referendum, re-scheduled for June 27, would be indefinitely postponed due to the current COVID-19 outbreak in Haiti..

Haiti: COVID-19 update and the ongoing political crisis

Fri, 06/04/2021 - 8:57am by Tom

Haiti is experiencing a third wave of COVID-19 infections, and it is quickly emerging as possibly the worst one. Infections were initially concentrated in the north and in Port-au-Prince, but are quickly emerging everywhere. Near our program site in Gros Morne, there are cases at the local hospital, though for now, still manageable. A long overdue shipment of masks from Germany arrived - just as infections were increasing. However, in Port-au-Prince resources are strained. For example, at St.

Haiti’s Third COVID Wave?

Wed, 05/19/2021 - 1:35pm by Tom

Reports are beginning to emerge of a new wave of COVID-19 infections in Haiti, as hospitals scramble to find scarce supplies. Haiti, like many other impoverished countries, has no clear vaccination program in place. The government suffers from a lack of legitimacy on many fronts, and it is unlikely it could mobilize people on a wide scale to get vaccinated.

Yard gardens create food security one family at a time

Fri, 04/30/2021 - 11:30am by Tom

A long-standing aspect of the training done through our partners at the Jean Marie Vincent Formation Center in Haiti is work with families, typically women, to develop yard gardens or patio gardens.  These are small-scale projects, where family members learn to grow a surprisingly wide variety of vegetables in small spaces.

The current iteration of the yard garden project enrolled 375 new families during the first quarter of the year, with support from the seed bank and training from the agronomy team. Some highlights below:

Amidst the political turmoil, life goes on Gros Morne

Fri, 03/05/2021 - 2:18pm by Tom

Throughout February, as Haiti was facing an ongoing political crisis that has kept much of the country on edge, work continued. For the agronomy team from the Jean Marie Vincent Formation Center this meant visiting community organizations, presenting workshops, checking in with people and their livestock with the mobile clinic, and talking to farmers about the quality of the recent sweet potato harvest. I capture some of these activities below, with updates from the team. 

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