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Haiti: Cluny Sisters crowdfunding for education


Sisters working on reconstruction plans

Sisters working on reconstruction plans

Most nuns aren’t known for their self-promotion or social media savvy. Yet, in this day and age, it’s increasingly difficult to fund social services without making your case loud and proud. After years of trying to do it the humble way, Haiti’s Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny are stepping out of their comfort zone and, crowdfunding to push for the schools they need.

Their journey began in January 2010, when a magnitude 7 earthquake toppled Haiti’s capital and surrounding area, killing one in 30 Haitians, and bringing an already vulnerable population to its knees. By then, the Cluny Sisters ran one of Haiti’s four teacher-training colleges and educated around 10,000 girls annually. For many living in abject poverty, the Sisters remain the only lifeline out – though a daily meal and a massively subsidised education.

When the disaster hit, their losses were great: 10 schools, medical centres, an orphanage and the teacher training college, to name but some. In dire need of outside support, they tapped into their international networks throughout the Americas and Europe, and their Sisters and many past pupils, like myself, picked up the message.

When I asked what services they were most worried for, they told me about ‘Centre Rosalie Javouhey’, one of Haiti’s largest girls’ schools for slum dwellers. So, I thought I could connect them to the professional support they needed to ensure that Centre Rosalie Javouhey recovered properly.

At that point in 2010, there was hope that the international aid mechanism could facilitate a full recovery and deliver improvements on pre-disaster living standards. There were, after all, billions of dollars promised and hundreds of well-intended organisations there ready to use it. Yet, it soon became clear that the billions promised weren’t coming quickly, that what was available was destined for emergency aid and transitional shelter, and that it would be near impossible to secure for appropriate permanent reconstruction.

Dismayed by the obstacles to accessing recovery support, what began as a short-term helping hand, became a long-term mission. By May 2010, having failed to secure long-term development planning consultancy for the Sisters, I, along with colleagues from Arup and University College London, registered a new NGO, Thinking Development, to rise to the challenge.

Thinking Development’s main goal was to help the Sisters to re-design and reconstruct their biggest Port-au-Prince primary schools complex sustainably, and to document the case well so that it could be easily shared, replicated and learned from. We wanted to help the Sisters resist the pressure to settle for hand-outs that would lock their communities into poor infrastructure in the long term.

After years of to-and-fro to Haiti, working with the Port-au-Prince community, the plan is ready, but the funding isn’t. Money for high-density infrastructure in Haiti is hard to come by. It’s expensive to build multi-storey buildings in an unregulated, under-skilled, seismic and hurricane-prone place. Yet, it remains plainly obvious that in a country that lost 4000 schools, with a booming young population and vast slums, higher density schools are the only way to meet the demand.

Publicity doesn’t sit easily with the Sisters, but they’re moving with the times, and letting us give crowdfunding a try. Our current online campaign is perhaps the biggest of its kind, and already well underway with close to 75% of the target secured. It runs until 6.22pm on Sunday, 22 December. We would be massively grateful if you could take a look and help us hit the target before our deadline at: www.zequs.com/campaign/the-thinking-girls-school?utm_source=Zequs&utm_medium=crowdfunding+platform&utm_content=The+#ThinkingGirls+School+is+launching!+It's+a+pilot+project+in+#Haiti+that+needs+your+little+person+power&utm_campaign=The+Thinking+Girls'+School

Linda O'Halloran, is the founding director of Thinking Development and a past pupil of Mount Sackville Secondary School in Dublin.

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