Working quality: A condition sine qua none
We started our mission with two imperatives: go in Haiti and analyze the need.
In July 2012, four members our team, including the president, visited Haiti to:
- Meet with families and children
- Visit schools
- Talk to teachers and area residents
- Monitor school registration
We focused on the Sobia school district, and chose two private schools in the region to work with. We chose these schools because of the quality of the teachers and the infrastructure to guarantee the children’s safety. Students were assigned to the two schools based on their residence.
Objectives
The goal of Lead by Example is to promote educational opportunities for children in Haiti. We began our work in Sobia (located in the south of the country), which is the village where our founder was born. Although Sobia has several private schools, many children do not attend school due to financial barriers.
According to the village’s last census in July 2016, more than 350 children aged 3 to 15 have never attended school or have been forced to quit school because of lack of resources.
Our mission is to make sure that all children in Sobia can find their way to school. We do this in two ways:
Provide scholarships to the children of the village so that they can be enrolled in existing schools
Help these schools develop their infrastructure to improve the learning environment
This is a long-term, sustainable project. We monitor the children’s registration and manage the payment of their school tuition fees from first through twelfth grade.
THE MESURES THAT TOOK PLACE
To fulfill our mission, we raise funds through the following efforts:
Charity events (professional basketball games with an audience of about 3000 people each year, concerts)
T-shirt sales under the brand “Lead by Example”
Membership fees
Donations
We have already empowered 180 children between the ages of 5 to 18 to attend school. The majority of these children were enrolled in kindergarten, and we are committed to paying their tuition fees up to their senior year in high school.