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About Just Haiti
The tet-a-tet of Just Haiti
Just Haiti works with Haitians and others to alleviate poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease in Haiti. We seek to create an environment for justice and peace through fostering and sponsoring activities that include sustainable business and community development, education, employment opportunity, health and medical services, infrastructure development, and improvement of environmental quality.
Just Haiti was formed in July 2007 and is a Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit corporation governed by four co-directors (Kim Lamberty, Bernard Nestor, Suzie De Quattro and Jim De Quattro). The directors use consensus in all decisionmaking.
Our first project is to help an association of coffee growers in Baradères, Haiti, to develop their own business for exporting their organic, shade-grown coffee to North America.
The coffee-growing roots of rural Haitian coffee-growers go back five and more generations. The coffee they produce is the world's second most valuable commodity—after petroleum.
So why are these farmers unable to afford adequate food, shelter and access to education and health services for themselves and their families?
Just Haiti was formed to help these families break loose from the economic injustice at the root of so much of their poverty.
In June 2006 in Baradères, a year before Just Haiti officially came into being, Suzie and Jim De Quattro and Judith Barbier met with two subsistence farmers.
They asked the two farmers if the area's coffee growers—also subsistence farmers—were interested in creating a grower-owned business for exporting coffee to the United States. The farmers, Juslhomme Aurace and Petuel Bruce, said they were very interested—primarily so they and their children can continue their family and community tradition of living on the land.
The June meeting followed several months of phone calls and emails among Barbier, her husband Bernard Nestor, the De Quattros, the Catholic pastor in Baradères—Father Pierre-Michel Brunache—and Kim Lamberty, who had initiated the idea for establishing Just Haiti.
The two farmers walked miles to get to the meeting—Juslhomme from the tiny mountain settlement of Leclerc, and Petuel from the riverside village of Vincendron. Area coffee growers curious about the export idea had appointed the men to represent them. Fr. Brunache also participated. It helped that he was already known and trusted by the growers. It also helped that the Just Haiti people were mostly familiar with and known to people in Baradères. All but Suzie had traveled there multiple times, and Judith is a Haitian native.
During the meeting, Petuel said he has six daughters who he hopes will continue the family's tradition of coffee growing. This will be difficult, he added. Market conditions are poor, and many children of Baradères leave and go elsewhere to try to make a living. Nearly all those who leave wind up trading rural poverty for urban poverty in places like the slums of Port-au-Prince.
But there isn't much opportunity in Baradères if you are a young man or woman seeking a better future.
Just Haiti works to change the equation. Exporting shade-grown coffee will require people with good literacy and business skills. This could persuade some of the bright young people in Baradères that they can have a productive future in their community after all.
In October 2006, as a followup to the June meeting, Kim, Judith and Jim met with two groups of growers—about 50 growers in all—in the mountains a few miles upstream from Baradères. The group and growers agreed that Just Haiti would help the growers develop an independent business. We emphasized that the growers should view any assistance as help toward developing a sustainable, association-owned business.
Growers were told that they would have to be willing to take some financial risk, and that there had to be a clear plan for paying individual growers. In the association, there could be no secrets, all decisions would be by consensus, and spending would be strictly controlled.
Planning for the export project continues. A milestone was reached in November 2008 when the first commercially shipped supply of coffee arrived in Baltimore.
To help the famers bring the project to fruition, Just Haiti is collaborating with Father Pierre Pascal Pierre, who directs a development office in Haiti for the Caritas organization, and with a growers’ association located in Chiapas, Mexico.
Just Haiti works to alleviate poverty, hunger, violence, illiteracy and disease in Haiti by fostering small-business development, education programs, employment opportunity, infrastructure improvement and environmental quality. Just Haiti is a Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization.
Copyright 2007-2010 Just Haiti, Inc.