6th Haiti Funders Conference
June 19th, 2025
This year, Roots of Development had the opportunity and honor to sponsor and contribute to the organization of the 6th Haiti Funders Conference, held in Boston from June 4th-6th. 150 people attended the conference, the theme of which was “Collaborating for Impact.” Roots and our partners collaborated with the Haiti Development Institute and other conference organizers in three areas:
- Roots led research on understanding funders’ priorities, practices, and preferences, hosting a plenary and breakout session at the conference on those topics.
- Louino Robillard, co-founder of Gwoup Konbit, participated in a panel discussion on peacebuilding in Haiti.
- Roots and Gwoup Konbit led a workshop on the topic “What do we want aid to look like in Haiti,” using the soon-to-be published Konbit Guide as a framework.
UNDERSTANDING FUNDERS’ PRIORITIES, PRACTICES, AND PREFERENCES
Following the last Haiti Funders Conference in 2023, there was a call for continued conversation. In response, a small group of funders of Haitian-led development started to convene. The aid industry today is full of buzzwords—localization, community-, and locally led development dominate the conversation, but little investigation has been done on what it truly means to fund in a locally led way in Haiti. From January to April of 2025, we decided to do a deeper dive by conducting in-depth interviews with thirteen funding organizations with the goal of collecting information on funding preferences, priorities, and practices.
1) Practices, the actual mechanisms of grantmaking utilized (e.g. application formats, reporting requirements)
Through a series of in-depth interviews with thirteen funders of Haitian-led development, we identified funding practices and grouped them into three categories: most common, less common, and distinct practices. Those findings were presented in a plenary session at the conference. To view the presentation, click here.
Most common practices, shared by a majority of funders interviewed, included:
- Support for local leadership
- Trust-based approach to funding
- Power-shifting mentality
- Network and ecosystem building
Less common practices, shared by 3-6 funders interviewed, included:
- Communicating frequently with grantees
- Encouraging ‘safe failure’
- Bringing leaders together
- Helping grantees find other funding
- Providing support beyond the grant term
- Focusing on current grantees
- Defining impact with communities
Distinct practices, practiced by 1 or 2 funders interviewed, included:
- Fighting burnout and mental illness
- Developing kindred relationships
- Allocating funding for risk mitigation
- Building a diaspora endowment
- Funding without sectoral limits
- Building a rolodex of resources
Roots Managing Director Charlie Estes and Research, Learning, & Advocacy Manager Jessica Hsu presenting Diverse Funder Practices at the Haiti Funders Conference.
2) Priorities, where and what sectors of aid funders prioritize (e.g., education in rural areas)
The Roots and HDI teams worked together to survey participants of the conference for their grantmaking priorities–namely, where in Haiti their grantees work and what sectors they fund.
3) Preferences, the forms of work in communities that funders feel make the most impact
Through our interviews, we also identified a number of preferences funders have, usually for a type of work that they feel has the greatest impact on communities. Building on those results, Roots team led a session on Measuring Impact with Community-led and Localization Models during the Haiti Funders Conference.
Courtenay Cabot Venton from ShareTrust discussed her report “Passing the Buck: The Economics of Localization,” which shows how much more cost effective it is to go through proximate intermediaries that are closer to communities. Federico Motka of the Vitol Foundation spoke about Vitol’s global partners working in Support for Community-Led Response (SCLR) and their impacts linking responses during crisis to development and long-term peacebuilding.
We then invited participants to share stories of locally led impact, looking for common themes that can be used to build an evidence base for community-led development. Some of the themes that emerged were: breaking dependency, building social cohesion, repairing the social fabric, nation building, systems transformation, peacebuilding, behavioral change, and gender equity. Many of these had also come up in the survey we conducted.
As we move forward, we intend to continue conducting research into funders’ priorities, preferences, and practices; reflecting on how funders best align with the needs of community-led groups in and outside of Haiti; and building an evidence base for community-led development.
INSIGHTS ON SECURITY CHALLENGES AND PEACEBUILDING
Gwoup Konbit Co-Founder Louino Robillard, alongside Melodie Cerin and Siria Gastelum of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and Daniel Tillias of SAKALA, participated in a conversation on peacebuilding, moderated by Jake Johnston, author of Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti and Director of International Research at the Center for Economic Policy & Research.
Read our recent interview with Louino Robillard on the role of peacebuilding in the current situation in Haiti: https://rootsofdevelopment.org/robipeacebuilding/.
WHAT DO WE WANT AID TO LOOK LIKE IN HAITI?
Following the dismantlement of USAID in January and the withdrawal of governments around the world from their aid commitments, there is an opportunity to re-invent the aid system that has caused so much damage in Haiti and led to the waste of billions of dollars. A new aid system must avoid the mistakes of the past and be focused on breaking dependency cycles and rebuilding social cohesion in Haiti.
At Roots, we believe that Haitian voices and leaders should be at the center of any conversation about the future of aid in Haiti. We invited Louino Robillard and Dr. Cassandra Jean-Francois, two leaders of Gwoup Konbit, to discuss the work that Gwoup Konbit has done in the last four years in creating the Konbit Guide, which will be published this summer.
The Konbit Guide is a manual on the history, types, adaptations, and uses of konbit, including an exploration of konbit’s five values and twelve principles. The Guide was created through a collective process involving more than 300 people over the course of 55 workshops and five years. It is a living and breathing document intended to inform community-led action in Haiti and inspire other culturally rooted mutual aid movements around the world. Click here to explore an overview of the Guide.
Konbit Values: solidarity, responsibility, collaboration, reciprocity, and participation.
Konbit Principles: sharing, transparency, trust, respect, equity, ethics, perseverance, flexibility, adaptation, innovation, interdependence, and sustainability.
The values and principles of konbit identified in the Guide are not unique—they can be found in many organizations’ principles, in and outside of Haiti. However, the process that Gwoup Konbit underwent to truly examine each value and principle, its significance, and how it shows up in various aspects of life in Haiti is totally distinct.
With a group of funders conference attendees, we collectively took part in a process modeled after Gwoup Konbit’s, investigating some of these principles within the funding context. Participants discussed Trust, Interdependence, Innovation, and Adaptability—how each principle shows up in funder-grantee relationships, how the conventional aid system suffers from a lack of each principle, and how a future aid system could benefit from more of each principle.
Thank you to the Haiti Development Institute and other conference organizers for giving us the opportunity to help shape this year’s conference. To learn more about or be a part of further research and conversations we are having around the future of aid, the impact of community-led development, or the preferences, practices, and priorities of funders, please reach out to Jessica Hsu at jhsu@rootsofdevelopment.org
The conference was organized by the Haiti Development Institute, with support from FOKAL/Ayiti Demen and the Network of Engaged International Donors. Photo Credits: Haiti Development Institute, Chokarella