Haitians: An idea isn’t a plan and having an agenda doesn’t mean deceit | Opinion Part 2/2

BROOKLYN— If you’ve been around enough Haitian uncles and fathers, you’ve probably heard this one. It’s usually about some untrustworthy dude being up to something complex, aka corrupt. 

“Ahhh, misye sou plan. Se aksyone li ye. Tout afe-l konplike.” In English, “That guy is up to something. He’s a hustler. Everything he does is complicated.”

With that mentality of “a plan” being seen as inherently nefarious, could that be why we have so little in the form of written strategies in the Haitian community? Or in Haiti, for that matter? Sure, the State Department and non–Haitians have plans for Haiti, like this U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability (SPCPS). The Democrats have a platform, as do Republicans and conservatives. New York City has plans, powerful blocs – like the Jewish diaspora and NAACP – have laid out their priorities. 

But where are the plans developed – and documented in writing – by Haitians ourselves? 

We’re hard-put to find them. What we do find are either verbal proclamations with no follow-up or recommendations under the purview of a single person or fringe group. For example, this letter  from the Office of the Haitian Diaspora to the White House “enthusiastically” proposing a special envoy. In either case, these purported agendas are so self-serving, short-sighted and performative, they fail to gain traction beyond a small circle of friends. Then, they just fail.  

We know better. And we should be doing better. We should have plans at every level and we should demand that our self-proclaimed leaders also put their ideas or promises in writing so we can coordinate efforts and hold them accountable. Anything else is djolè – just talk.

Your job has plans and so should your community

So many of us have been in jobs where your team, department, division and entire company each have a written plan. Right? You’ve been in roles where people know what they’re responsible or accountable for, down to approval for buying office supplies. I’ve worked with places that review spending on pencils or even making copies when they’re in cost-cutting mode. 

Actually, even before you start working, when you’re in school, you get a syllabus that breaks down what you’re there to learn, how long it should take, how you’ll be graded and the consequences (or mitigation steps) for not meeting requirements. That’s a very basic agenda.

Yet, many of us Haitians get angry when asked to show plans for our community or our demands for funding are rejected because they don’t have details like who’s doing what or how.

But I get where the need is coming from. Having been away from the Haitian community for more than a decade, the disconnects jumped out. So when I first rejoined The Haitian Times, I asked basic questions too. The biggest one was: “What do Haitians here want or care about most anyway?”

Priorities and playbooks galore, but to what end?

Cue our reporters asking the question as they pursued stories all across the Haitian community. We got answers that revealed the lack of thinking, much less planning, needed to harness the community’s power. Fortunately, however, we did also see some efforts at a strategic approach in different pockets. That part gives me hope that we’ll eventually get to some sort of documented, overarching agenda. 

Right now, here are some sample plans and activities, all uncoordinated, to highlight why we need an agenda: 

• In 2020, NHAEON shared a list of policy recommendations it called a community agenda during the last presidential elections. This year, NHAEON is working on a more robust plan. Why it’s under wraps is beyond me since, you would think, something for 1.5 million people, should be a public endeavor.
• In 2021, our series on how elected officials distribute discretionary funds angered some folks in New York. A few stopped returning our calls and told others not to speak with us.
• In 2022, Little Haiti Brooklyn (LHBK) officials spoke about having “a plan” to create a Business Improvement District that would turn around central Brooklyn. Turns out there was no actual plan, only the idea to look into developing one.
• In 2022, the New York Haitian American Alliance produced a community needs assessment and initially playbook for handling crises. Nothing has come out of it since. 
• In 2023, when the $250 million EminiFX fraud came to light, no officials had any response, much less plan to assist the mostly 25,000 Haitians affected. Their silence was surreal.
• In 2024, too many Haitian roundtables, letters to the White House and legislative proposals have stumped me in their gall, lack of coordination and vapid premises. A $50 billion Louverture Investment Plan announced around Haitian Flag Day looks like simple lip service.    

Still, Haitians were absent from the granddaddy of all tables, that White House State Dinner for Kenya. I for one would like to see us spend as much or more time organizing — consistently — as we do marching and pushing out “save Haiti” statements during crises.

Promising efforts underway, but only one meets the mark  

To be fair, many do try to push the community beyond cultural “enclaves” to power blocs. We’ve seen attempts like HAA’s recent Leaders Power Summit, the UCF community dialogue series and even HAFFD’s miniscule national survey. Their existence shows a start toward becoming ready. The trick now is to pull them together and make sense out of them to create a comprehensive plan.

Only one effort really stands out, the “Haitian-American Policy Agenda 2021: Reflections from South Florida.”  At 29 pages, the document lays out seven key priorities for our community, with emphasis on what Haitians in Miami/Broward/Palm Beach counties need prioritized. Led by Sant La and Ayiti Community Trust (ACT), the agenda includes input from 13 community partners. In actuality, the plan came out of the Haitian-American Community Agenda Conference of February 2020. In spirit though, some who shaped it have told me, it was nearly 20 years in the making, the product of ongoing conversations that began in the early 2000s.

One outcome of that entire process, not the agenda itself, is the emerging leaders fellowship class at Sant La, which trains promising youngsters for various roles to execute plans that benefit the larger community. People like community organizer Santra Denis and North Miami City Clerk Vanessa Joseph came out of early versions of that process. And speaking with those two leaders, I can see and appreciate their view of themselves as being in service to the community, instead of the other way around. 

Let’s do the prep work transparently

So  – why not take that agenda and build on it for Haitian communities across the nation? From there, it’s a matter of laddering up the common issues, priorities and recommendations into a national plan.  

But how, you ask? How do we consolidate our scattered efforts into a unified, strategic Haitian American community agenda? How do we get to a comprehensive, yet succinct document that: 

1. Articulates what we need and want.
2. Suggests high-level tactics to support the strategy that allow flexibility –  such as stakeholders to target, messaging, legislative priorities and locale-specific asks for meetings with mayors. 
3. Includes metrics to measure success (or lack thereof).

Since keeping plans under wraps only fosters mistrust, my thought is for us to go through the process of forming an agenda publicly, over the next 3-5 years, by building on what we do have. This will mean acknowledging our internal squabbles and limiting mindsets as well as seeking allies to give us the cheat codes at times. But first, folks must let go of the belief that they know best about everything.

If we can take a step back and play our roles well behind the scenes, however, our agenda will serve as our shining star, a real show of the fòs we’ve talked about for 220 years.