Support Haitian relief.
TAKE ACTION
Boost or donate to the Centre Hospitalier de Fontaine, Locally Haiti, and Ayiti Community Trust.
If people you know want to help Haiti by donating exclusively to large NGOs, help educate them about the reasons why many on the ground oppose their practices. Encourage them to contribute to locally-rooted organizations instead.
Support local mutual aid organizations creating resilience in the face of domestic disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
GET EDUCATED
By Andrew Lee (he/him)
An earthquake Saturday killed over 1,500 people and unhoused thousands more in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas and only nation founded by the formerly enslaved (CNN, World Bank). Tennis star Naomi Osaka pledged prize money from an upcoming championship to relief efforts (Huffington Post). Communities are providing support through organizations from nonprofits to congregations (Local 10) .
But when prominent leaders promoted seemingly-credible organizations like the Red Cross, Save the Children, and UNICEF, former aid workers and Haitian citizens objected. “As a Haitian,” said one Twitter user, “Do Not Donate to these organizations” (MSN). Many of the organizations circulating online are entrusted with funds that do not reach the local communities in need.
After a 2011 earthquake, the American Red Cross received $500 million in donations. They planned to build 700 homes by 2013, and claimed by 2015 to have sheltered 130,000 Haitians (PBS). But according to ProPublica and NPR, four years after the earthquake, they had built just six houses across the entire country. According to the program director, “officials wanted to know which projects would generate the good publicity, not which projects would provide the most homes” (ProPublica). The project leaders were not Haitian and spoke neither French nor Haitian Creole. The non-Haitian manager of a failed project to build houses in the neighborhood of Campeche received $140,000 in compensation. The top local staff member received less than a third of that (ProPublica).
There’s a wide disparity in power between foreign nationals from wealthy countries who give humanitarian aid and its recipients. Save the Children covered up over fifty cases a year of staff child abuse (National News). Oxfam was accused of covering for its top staff in Haiti who illegally hired sex workers, some potentially underaged (BBC). Beyond abuse, the aid sector in Haiti is so large it deforms the national economy and democratic governance; the country is known as the Republic of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) (The Nation). “U.S food aid flooding the market has provided cheap food but driven many Haitian farmers off the land,” and as journalist Jonathan Katz says, “There was no way for Haitians to appeal an NGO decision, prosecute a bad soldier, or vote an unwanted USAID project out of a neighborhood… Two centuries of turmoil and foreign meddling had left a Haitian state so anemic it couldn’t even count how many citizens it had” (America Magazine). As one resident of Haiti said, “We cannot develop our country with international aid” (BBC).
This is not to say that every supporter or staff member of large charities are malicious or that they never get results. But the gulf in wealth and decision-making power between largely white-led aid organizations (The Guardian) and the people they’re supposed to help opens the door to mismanagement and abuse. This imbalance also appeared domestically during Hurricane Katrina relief. One county executive said Black residents were “treated like cattle” in relief centers (NBC News). Since it was donors and not residents who decided what was sent, there were “mismatches between the needs of victims and the supplies the Red Cross had lined up” like two truckloads of moldy cinnamon rolls and battery-operated radios without batteries (N.Y. Times).
It wasn’t the government or nonprofits who first entered New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward with support. It was a local mutual aid organization founded by a former Black Panther. “People from the community asked us to be here, and the goal for this clinic is to transition from a first-aid emergency response to a functional community-controlled primary care clinic. In other words, this is for the community in the long run and not just we're a bunch of do-gooders,” said nurse and collective member Scott Weinstein (NPR).
In Haiti too, grassroots organizations run by or connected to those most impacted need support. The Centre Hospitalier de Fontaine, a hospital for underserved communities, is accepting direct donations (CHF). Locally Haiti is working to “funnel aid to in the most direct and efficient way to the local people and institutions” (Locally Haiti). The Ayiti Community Trust, run by Haitians and diaspora members, is providing resources to groups on the ground (ACT).
In the wake of such disasters, the most important thing is to support those affected. We can’t do that responsibly unless we recognize them — not as characters in a fundraising video but actual people, many of whom are telling us that international charities are unaccountable to Haitians, that their resources are not used responsibly, and even function as an unelected government run from London or Washington. When aid directed from wealth countries marginalizes “the Haitian state, Haitian social organizations and Haitian businesses,” we are looking not at disaster relief but disaster imperialism (The Nation). We need to pay attention to communities in dire needs to find out how to truly help.
Key Takeaways
Many people want to help Haitian earthquake survivors through large organizations like the Red Cross.
Such organizations are unaccountable to the people they serve. In Haiti, they comprise a de facto government while international food aid actually harms domestic agriculture.
There are also organizations which distribute resources to local communities and put decision-making power in the hands of those directly affected.