Support Sister Cities Essex Haiti This Holiday Season

Dear Friend,

The current situation in Haiti is extremely challenging, with continued political instability, gang violence, and fuel shortages throughout the country.

Thanks to generous supporters like you, Sister Cities Essex Haiti offers hope to the people of Deschapelles. Your donation helps provide lifelong learning and literacy skills, enabling them to participate and contribute to their community.

While the international community considers the best course of action to assist Haiti, it is small organizations like ours that make a difference in their daily lives. For the past 12 years, we have been providing much-needed resources for children and adults in Deschapelles.

Thanks to your generous donations, we can:

Provide the people of Deschapelles with a well-lit, safe gathering space for ideas and learning despite the chaos and turmoil elsewhere in the country.
Provide access to a great variety of high-quality resources, information, and tools to help enhance their lives.
Provide educational programs, lectures, and workshops ranging from basic reading and writing to more advanced topics on civics and social responsibility.
Support teachers and students by providing a safe learning environment outside of the classroom.
Teach the importance of teamwork through programs such as robotics, music, and tennis.

Your support is greatly appreciated. Gifts of all types and sizes make a difference to our friends in Deschapelles, Haiti. You may make your donation through our website by visiting the donation page www.sistercitiesessexhaiti.org/donate/. Thank you again for your commitment to Sister Cities Essex Haiti.

With thanks and warm wishes,

Sincerely,

The Board of Directors

Sister Cities Essex Haiti

Sister Cities Essex Haiti is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Your donation is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Sister Cities Essex Haiti Receives Grant from the Community Foundation of Middlesex County

Sister Cities Essex Haiti is delighted to report that we have received a grant from the Community Foundation of Middlesex County in the amount of $1500 for a Capacity Building and Strategic Planning project. SCEH has been very successful in responding to requests by the community of Deschapelles, Haiti including the construction of a 3000 square foot library, a thriving music program and a highly competitive tennis program as well as supporting a robotics team that was initiated in part in collaboration with students from Valley Regional High School. We determined that to sustain our success and continue to raise funds and awareness, we need to find ways to improve our volunteer structure and attract more volunteers; to update our mission statement and to develop a strategic plan including a marketing plan. We have already used part of the grant for an organizational development workshop under the guidance of TGezo Building Consultants and are moving forward with plans to make our organization function more smoothly.

We are grateful to the Community Foundation of Middlesex County not only for providing this grant but also for the guidance they have provided us. We were initially established under the umbrella of the Community Foundation of Middlesex County when we started 12 years ago after the 2010 earthquake. Congratulations to the Foundation on 25 Years of helping organizations in the community. Thank you.

SCEH Selected For Essex Savings Bank 2022 Investment Program

Get Out and Vote!

Donations are our lifeblood and Essex Savings Bank gives thousands of dollars to help aid our efforts.

Essex Savings Bank will be collecting votes throughout the month of February. At the end of this period, the votes are tallied and translate into a percentage of the total amount of allocated funds. Support Sister Cities Essex Haiti by voting!

Rules to vote:

If you are a customer of Essex Savings Bank you are eligible to vote for up to three of your favorite non-profit organizations beginning February 1 through February 28, 2022.
A customer will be defined as any person having a loan, deposit account, or safe deposit box with the Bank.
Each customer, regardless of the number of accounts held, will be allowed to complete only one ballot.
Customers may vote electronically by logging onto their Essex Savings Bank online banking account or through the app.
Paper ballots are available at any of the Bank’s six branches. Visit essexsavings.com to learn more about participating organizations.

About Essex Savings Bank
Essex Savings Bank is a FDIC-insured, state-chartered, mutual savings bank established in 1851. The Bank serves the Connecticut River Valley and shoreline with six offices in Essex (2), Chester, Madison, Old Lyme, and Old Saybrook providing a full complement of personal and business banking. Financial, estate, insurance, and retirement planning are offered throughout the state by the Bank’s Trust Division, Essex Trust, and wholly-owned subsidiary, Essex Financial Services, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisor.

Haiti & Democracy: A Conversation with Author Laurent Dubois

On Tuesday, September 14, 2021, as part of our 2021-2022 speaker series, Understanding Haiti, author Laurent Dubois, discussed the long-term history of the country in a lecture entitled “Haiti & Democracy”, focusing on the complex political and cultural dynamics that have shaped the present at the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme. If you missed the lecture, you can view it here! Please go to minute 15:00 to advance to the lecture. The first 15 minutes was a SECWAC meeting.

This free presentation was a hybrid event sponsored by Sister Cities Essex Haiti and Southeast Connecticut World Affairs Council.

“A passionate and insightful account by a leading historian of Haiti that traces the sources of the country’s devastating present back to its turbulent and traumatic history.”
MacMillan Publishing

Laurent Dubois is a veteran educator and a specialist on the history and culture of the Atlantic world who has published several award-winning books, including “A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804” (Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and UNC Press, 2004), winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize, and “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History” (Metropolitan Books, 2012), named a New York Times Notable Book of 2012. His writings on music, history and sports – soccer in particular – have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and Sports Illustrated.

Welcome to SISTER CITIES ESSEX HAITI!

MUSIC PROJECT UPDATE

Who would have dreamed that the first efforts of Sister Cities Essex Haiti’s music project in 2012 would result in the first-ever performance in Deschapelles of a classical chamber concert with six musicians from the Ecole de Musique from Ste. Trinite in Port au Prince? To learn more, click here. CROSS CULTURAL EXCHANGE PROJECT Essex Elementary School students and students in Deschapelles continue to exchange their experiences and learn about one another’s culture. To learn more, click here.

SISTER CITIES ESSEX HAITI RECIPIENT OF SCI 2014 INNOVATION AWARD!!
Sister Cities International selected Sister Cities Essex Haiti as the recipient of their 2014 Innovation Award in Youth & Education for a population of less than 100,000!!! The award was given for SCEH’s Early Education Teacher Training Project. SCI established the Annual Awards Program in 1962 to bring international recognition to “exceptional sister city programs”. We are extremely grateful to have received this award. To learn more about the award, please click here. And to see a video about the Teacher Training Project, click here!

SISTER CITIES HAS A “HAITI SHELF” AT THE ESSEX LIBRARY
Want to know more about Haiti? The Essex Library now has a “Haiti Shelf” just opposite the circulation desk. There are fiction and non-fiction books about the history, culture, and people of Haiti. Come check it out!