A Haiti where every girl can play, create, learn, and lead
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A Haiti where every girl can play, create, learn, and lead 🌺
Our Mission is to accompany Haitian girls in underserved communities as they improve their learning, health, and well-being through art-centered educational programs in safe and nurturing environments. Using the arts as an educational tool to build inner strength, hope and resiliency, Lidè is committed to the next generation of Haitian female leaders, creators and entrepreneurs to bring about change and transformation in underserved communities.
WHO WE SERVE
Adolescent girls in Haiti have tremendous talent, capacity, and potential. They also face multiple challenges, including a high mental health burden, school attendance rates between 21 and 34%, and a high proportion of girls who are not in any form of education, employment, or training. These realities, exacerbated by Haiti’s ongoing natural disasters and political turmoil and instability, impede adolescent girls’ ability to build healthy relationships, cultivate their innate, educational, and economic potential, and serve as leaders in their communities.
Lidè programs reach over 1,200 girls ages 11 to 21 who are out of school or significantly behind in age-to-grade, live in rural underserved communities where the majority of the community is living in extreme poverty, have experienced trauma or live in chronic stress, live in situations of domestic labor, have or are currently suffering abuse, are experiencing food insecurity or the effects of malnutrition, and/or have a disability.
We work in rural communities through the Artibonite region and the South of Haiti. Lidè trains and employs locals within the Haitian communities it serves, and collaborates with grassroots organizations and schools so that programs derive from and meet local needs, strengthen and utilize local capacity, and foster the community support girls need to complete their educational journeys.
OUR PROGRAMS
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Girls in Lidè discover their unique voice through our arts programs, which include creative writing, theater, photography, and dance. These programs are designed to support girls to: foster healthy relationships, appreciate diversity, strengthen their ability to resolve conflict, and cultivate flexible thinking, adaptability, innovation, and hope.
The arts also enable girls to deepen awareness of their emotions, develop a growth mindset, improve their cognition and communication skills, build their ability to problem-solve, and develop a sense of dignity and confidence in their ability to create a better world.
Our arts programs become a gateway into an academic education as well as a means for improving literacy, leadership and critical thinking. And, all our arts activities incorporate values-based themes, such as compassion, service, kindness, and justice, which help adolescent girls explore the life questions that all youth face on a local and global scale.
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Lidè enables girls to access formal and informal education and learning opportunities, offering over 1,150 primary and secondary school scholarships, tutoring, literacy instruction, computer skills, guidance counseling, vocational scholarships, and a chess program.
Research shows that girls education yields tremendously positive outcomes across multiple domains, including: increased economic growth, reduction of child marriage and domestic violence, healthier mothers and babies, higher education rates for children, improved mental health for girls, reductions in climate change, reductions in terrorism, and increased female leadership in government.
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Lidè’s team of nurses and cooks provide nutrition, health education, counseling, and medical services to our participants. This includes regular health screenings, reproductive health education, individual and group therapy, support calls to participants and their families, and hundreds of delicious and healthy locally sourced meals a week for our participants.
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Building relationships with participants’ parents and like-minded community organizations is central to our efforts to help build an ecosystem that supports gender equality in the communities where we work and is essential for the success and health of our programs. This means regularly holding spaces for parents, school principals, and community organizations working on child protection to come together and share, learn, and deepen collaboration on behalf of the girls we serve.
Our parent and community engagement work includes home visits, parent education and advocacy, trainings with school principals, and participation in a regional child protection working group.
OUR IMPACT
Lidè participants are learning to read, getting scholarships to begin, continue, and complete primary and secondary school, building their psychosocial resilience and self-confidence through our arts programming, improving their physical and mental health through counseling and medical services, and strengthening their nutrition through the thousands of meals we serve a year to participants-meals that are often their only source of daily food in an atmosphere of food scarcity. And, we know that our participants are transmitting the skills they are learning to others, particularly siblings and peers. This dynamic multiplies Lidè’s impact, as capacities developed ripple beyond program participants to diverse members of each community we serve. Hear from our participants about the impact of our work here.
OUR STORY
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.
Lidè started working in the Artibonite region of Haiti, in Gonaives, in January 2014 and initially partnered with CARE, who provided us with participants that needed schooling.
To hear more about the origin story of Lidè and it’s evolution, listen here, here, and here.
