L’union fait la force.
Food, healthcare, and school
PATCH works with families in Haiti who go without all three. We provide relief to people suffering from a lack of nutritious food and adequate healthcare, and we put children in school — with supplies, with equipment, and with teachers.
Relief, and instruction.
PATCH is organised and operated exclusively for educational, medical and charitable purposes. In practice that comes down to three things a family cannot do without.
Food
Relief for families who go without nutritious food. It comes first because hunger makes everything after it harder — a child who has not eaten does not learn, and an adult who has not eaten cannot work.
Healthcare
Access to adequate healthcare for people the public system does not reach. Haiti’s state services do not extend far enough into the communities where we work, and the gap is measured in untreated illness.
School
Education and instruction: the school supplies and equipment children need, and access to teachers. Schooling is the part of this that compounds — it is what makes the next generation need us less.
How we go about it.
The purpose is broad. What we actually run is specific, and it starts in Gonaïves: a vocational training centre, and a programme that has taken more than 700 women through farming, trade, reading and arithmetic since 2012.
That programme is one route to the economic security the mission is aiming at — a family that earns enough buys its own food and its own medicine. It is not the whole of what we are for, but it is where the work has gone deepest.
Women have worked through the graduated business development programme in Gonaïves since 2012, diversifying their sources of income and raising what they earn across a year.
Vocational training centre, in the city of Gonaïves, teaching literacy, numeracy and business management.
Communities — Gonaïves in the Artibonite and Ouanaminthe in the Nord‑Est, on the Dominican border.
Founded in Port‑au‑Prince on 24 June by Rev. Jean Renaud Tisma, and recognised by the government of Haiti.
Two communities, chosen deliberately.
Haiti’s public services do not reach far enough. We work where the gap between what families need and what they can get is widest.
Gonaïves
A coastal city north of Port‑au‑Prince, and the capital of the Artibonite — the valley that grows most of Haiti’s rice. The training centre is here, and this is where the women’s programme runs.
Ouanaminthe
A border town on the Massacre River, across the water from Dajabón in the Dominican Republic. Our second community, and the other place our work is directed.
A church programme that became an organisation.
PATCH was founded in Port‑au‑Prince on 24 June 1998 by Rev. Jean Renaud Tisma, a pastor. It is recognised by the government of Haiti and incorporated in Massachusetts, where the United States side of the work is run.
We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organised exclusively for educational, medical and charitable purposes: relief for the poor, the distressed and the underprivileged in Haiti, and the instruction to carry a family past needing it.
No one here does this alone.
We are a small organisation. A gift, an hour, or a phone call from someone who knows how to do something we don’t all go a long way.