The Work in Haiti is Harder Now, but it Still Must Be Done

Our Executive Director, Dr. Thony Voltaire, is an award-winning, multilingual tropical family medicine practitioner who founded and leads a highly successful medical center in northern Haiti. He has had, I know, many opportunities to leave Haiti. At every turn, he has chosen instead to stay and stand with the people in his community.

In the summer of 2023, his life was threatened by gangs who feared the many ways Thony has worked to empower poor Haitians. He stayed then, and he stays now—despite losing USAID funding in 2024 and PEPFAR funding in 2026. He continues to keep the hospital open despite a shrinking staff, rising costs, fiercely complex supply chains, and increasing isolation from allies.

The here and now is impossibly hard to face. What keeps him going is his faith in the future.

When I ask Thony what I can do, he talks about R.I.I.S.E.—and, almost always, about the next generation. He reminds me that my work here in the USA is connected to his work in Haiti: that I can help young people here learn to see Haiti, that we can invest in girls’ futures, and that together we can create conditions in which girls in Haiti can see a future worth belonging to—because it includes them. As I prepare for another school year, I find myself returning to that charge.

R.I.I.S.E. aims to do just that: to work toward a future in which we use power imaginatively to create something more just. That work connects the young women I teach in the USA with those with whom we partner in northern Haiti—not because their lives or circumstances are the same, but because all of them should grow up understanding that they have the capacity to shape the world they inherit.

In this photo, taken in 2022, Thony stands with students I taught who are now in college. That night they performed Leyla McCalla’s “Vini Wè/Come See” at the Haitian Embassy in Washington, D.C. The work has gotten harder since that night—in Haiti for Thony and his community, and in the USA for people who care about justice.

But the future is still being made.

As we begin another school year, those of us committed to R.I.I.S.E. know there is work to be done. We commit ourselves, again, to doing it. Vini we....come look!

Submitted by Shields Sundberg