Relief first.
Then the means
to need less of it.
Food, healthcare and schooling are what we are for. The programme in Gonaïves is how we have gone about it so far.
What we are for
PATCH is organised and operated exclusively for educational, medical and charitable purposes: to provide relief to the poor, the distressed and the underprivileged in Haiti who suffer from a lack of nutritious food and adequate healthcare, and to provide education and instruction to people living in Haiti by donating the school supplies and equipment they need and providing access to teachers.
Our goals are to improve the health and the economic, social and educational well‑being of the people of Haiti — to reduce the daily struggles of families living in poverty, invest in their potential, and give their children the chance to grow up healthy, fed, schooled and economically secure.
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.
The Economic Empowerment of Women Entrepreneurs.
In 2012 we began an initiative for the economic empowerment of women entrepreneurs in Gonaïves. The goal was plain: raise women’s incomes, and raise their share of the local business that was already going on around them.
Haiti lives largely by agriculture, so that is where we started. The programme reworked how the women in it farmed and how they got their goods to market, training them in better agricultural practice and in running a business. It is structured as a graduated project — women move through it in stages rather than attending a single course and going home.
In its first two years, more than 700 women completed it. They came out selling from more than one source of income, and earning more across a year than they had before.
It 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, and keeps its children in school without anybody’s help — which is the point.
Farming
Training in better agricultural practice, for women working land in a country that still lives mostly by what it grows. The aim is a harvest that holds up and a crop worth carrying to market.
Trade
Business management, and the route from the field to the market stall. Women who finish the programme sell from more than one source of income, so a bad season in one crop is no longer the whole year.
Reading and numbers
Literacy and numeracy at the training centre in Gonaïves. A woman who can read a contract and keep her own accounts does not have to take anyone’s word for what she is owed.
Women have worked through the graduated business development programme in Gonaïves since 2012.
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.
A building, not a visit.
Alongside the programme we built a vocational training centre in the city of Gonaïves. It teaches the basics that everything else depends on: reading, arithmetic, and how to manage a business.
The centre matters because it stays. A workshop that arrives and leaves teaches a season. A room with a teacher in it, in the town where the women already live, teaches whoever walks in next year.
What a gift pays for. Food and medical relief for families who have neither, the school supplies and equipment we send to children whose families cannot buy them, and teaching hours at the centre in Gonaïves. Ways to give
Two communities.
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.
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.