HISTORY AND FOUNDERS

Lidè was established by Author Holiday Reinhorn, Actor Rainn Wilson and Dr. Kathryn Adams as a short term project to provide healing through the arts for adolescent girls who had survived the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. During a two-week program, the three of them watched girls mend and find their own voices. Afterward, they watched those same girls try to hang on to those voices and teach other girls what they had learned. But they needed support, and so the idea of creating year-round programs aimed at building resiliency and empowering adolescent girls began.

We asked that original group what they would call the program. “Lidè” they said. There are two very similar words in Kreyol. With an accent, the word means “leader,” and without an accent, it means “idea.” We asked the girls which one they meant. “Both,” they said.

Lidè started working in the Artibonite region of Haiti, in Gonaives, in January 2014 and initially partnered with CARE, who was providing us with participants that needed schooling. We started with a few dozen girls at a school named St. Jean. Other communities learned about what we were doing and invited us to establish a program in Bayonne. Another partner, Smallholder Farmers Alliance, invited us to open a program in Mapou. Then, Fonkoze partnered with us to create a literacy program in Souvenance. The communities also had many kids with cognitive delays, so we partnered with BSEIPH, Haiti’s Office of the Secretary of State for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities, to establish another program for kids with disabilities.

To hear more about the origin story of Lidè and it’s evolution, listen here, here, and here.

Rainn Wilson, Co-Founder

Rainn Wilson is a three-time Emmy Award nominated actor, best known for the role of Dwight Schrute in NBC's The Office. He is the host of the new Peacock docu-series "Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss" in which he travels the world in search of happiness.

Rainn is the co-founder of the digital media company SoulPancake which created thousands of pieces of content and over a billion video views, including viral hits like Kid President, My Last Days, and The Idiots Guide to Climate Change.

Rainn co-wrote the New York Times bestselling SOULPANCAKE: Chew on Life's Big Questions as well as his comedic memoir, The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith and Idiocy. His newest book is entitled Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution.

Holiday Reinhorn, Co-Founder

Author Holiday Reinhorn visited Haiti for the first time in 2009 with the Mona Foundation and returned to facilitate a UN Foundation-funded program, Girls United, after the earthquake of 2010. She has been committed to serving grassroots educational initiatives in the most remote areas of Haiti ever since.

Holiday is the author of BIG CATS: Stories from Free Press. Her fiction has been featured in numerous literary magazines and has been anthologized in THIS IS NOT CHICK LIT, THE WORST YEARS OF YOUR LIFE, and NAMING THE WORLD.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of a Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship, The Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and a PEN/Amazon.com Short Story Award, among others.  Holiday has taught creative writing at The University of Wisconsin at Madison, The University of Iowa and The UCLA Writers’ Extension Program.

Dr. Kathryn Adams, Co-Founder & Founding Executive Director

A specialist in the psychology of teaching and learning, and Education in Emergencies, Dr. Adams spent her career working in crisis and conflict zones worldwide.  Prior to directing Lidè, Dr. Adams was a tenured professor at Moorpark College, and also taught educational psychology in the counseling and education graduate programs at California Lutheran University.  Dr. Adams has worked as a therapist with children in foster care, counseled children in elementary school settings, directed an academic support center, and facilitated therapeutic writing groups for veterans and for survivors of sexual trauma. She served on the advisory board of the Mona Foundation, as a member of an international working group for Global Citizenship Education, was a founding team member of HST (Health Support Team), and co-created a video training series on the effects of trauma on learning which is reaching teachers in post-disaster regions and in conflict zones. In 2011, she coordinated and co-facilitated Girls United: Haiti, the project that would lead to the formation of Lidè. Kathryn Janene Adams held a M.A. in Writing, a M.A. in Clinical Psychology, and a Doctorate in Education. Dr. Adams passed away in January 2021.