What We’re Doing

Together with the Children’s Academy leadership team and the community, Haiti Partners is pushing the envelope in collaborative leadership. Teachers, staff, and parent volunteers are learning to take greater leadership and responsibility as their part in realizing a big vision. Whether it’s structures of accountability like the school committee, leadership team or parent association, or in collaborative practices like teachers making decisions about new hires, what’s happening at the Children’s Academy is completely atypical for Haiti. The result is that people bring their whole selves to their work and engage enthusiastically to help carry out our shared mission.

There are a couple methods we use in particular to teach an approach to leadership completely different from Haiti’s norm. One is Open Space Technology, a meeting method through which participants self-organize to discuss and address the issues they identify as most important under a particular theme. Another is Touchstones, a discussion-based education method for diverse groups that teaches collaborative leadership through weekly, structured discussions of short, carefully selected texts.

Strong partnerships support our goal of establishing a new leadership paradigm at the Children’s Academy and elsewhere. Haiti Partners is a proud member of the WorldBlu network, and has made the Worldblu List of Freedom-Centered Workplaces eight years running. The Children’s Academy has also made the list for the last two years. To make the list every employee takes a survey gauging the organization based on 10 principles of freedom-centered leadership. We have also worked with and drawn inspiration from Barrett Values Centre to become a more values-based organization and to better integrate positive values into the education that our schools provide.