Freshman Service: Expanding Impact

As part of HELP’s Citizenship & Leadership curriculum, all students participate in service projects designed to give students experience in planning and executing a community project.  This year, service-learning has an exciting new initiative!  Each year, all HELP freshmen will participate in the newly formed HELP literacy project; a reading program entirely run by first-year HELP students, available to schools and organizations in Haiti. There is a tremendous crisis in early childhood literacy rates in Haiti.  With this project, we hope to help as many children as possible gain the literacy proficiency they need to excel in school and beyond.

The HELP literacy project begins with HELP students receiving intensive training in teaching methods for literacy development. Then they are then matched with children under the age of 10 who need extra support to reach grade 2 reading proficiency in Creole. During the academic year, HELP students will work with children at partner schools and organizations in Port-au-Prince but HELP also encourages them to teach in their neighborhoods when they return home in the summer.

Every year, HELP students will assist over one hundred children in developing their Creole literacy.

HELP Academic Director, Meaghan Balzer says, “Our hope is that they will teach other adults in their communities how to teach literacy development, so that they may continue the work when our students return to school.”

The goal of this project is two-fold. First, HELP hopes to build civic engagement and responsibility by engaging our students in a meaningful community service project. Second, we hope to improve literacy levels in Haiti one child at a time, giving them the possibility to grow academically and grow toward a brighter future.

Through this project, HELP freshmen will become a part of HELP’s mission to give every child in Haiti a chance at a better education and a brighter future. We hope with this early introduction to civic leadership that HELP students will feel prepared and empowered to begin making a difference in their community even after just one year of leadership training.