span style="font-size: small">Claude Reginald (“Reggie”) Jean has been a humanitarian helping below-poverty-level children and other underprivileged Haitians since 1980. He comes from a family of 8 children. His mother was incredibly loving and was a “mother” to hundreds around her. His father came from a modest family, and despite economic constraints, managed to support his own large family, in addition to helping those less fortunate. These humanitarian seeds were planted in Reggie and his two brothers.
span style="font-size: small">Reggie holds two Master’s Degrees (in Data Communications and Management) and worked in management positions in the telecommunications industry for 27 years. He also taught college students in Haiti for 23 years. He observed many students, highly intelligent, having no real opportunities, who had lost hope. He also saw the hundreds of thousands of children living on the streets, having to beg and fend for their own survival, and he decided to do something about these non-optimum conditions.
span style="font-size: small">Reggie has supported poor families, giving them food and clothes, that he collected and re-distributed. He has delivered life-improvement (tools on how to study, basics of communication, and administration) seminars to thousands of young people through many different schools in the Port-aa-Prince area and other cities all over the nation.
span style="font-size: small">He has personally paid tuition for over 300 children's schooling through high school and technical school. He has supported many orphanages since 1986. In 2010, he started the Future of Haiti Orphanage (FOHO) after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, when several of the orphanages he had been supporting perished. Many of the children at FOHO came from these orphanages.
span style="font-size: small">Reggie has also bought many pieces of land, particularly dry land, and has taught children how to cultivate, reforest and protect trees.
Main Office
411 Cleveland St., 248 Clearwater, FL 33755
Phone: (727)466-7705 Email: info@grodysh.org
GRODYSH (GROup Dynamic for the Survival of Haiti) was formed in Haiti in 2000.
For many years, we remained powerless and inactive, observing children and young people from 5 to 25, who travel 5-20 km by foot every day to reach their school, sick people and pregnant women in labor, being transported on donkeys’ backs, or on make-shift stretchers carried by two or four people to the closest health center that was hours from their home, young girls and boys abandoning their beautiful peasant environment to put themselves in sub-human conditions in the overcrowded shanty towns, endlessly increasing in population and size, surrounding the main cities like Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitien, Gonaives, Jacmel, Jeremie, Hinche, etc. trying desperately to escape the extreme poverty that is a menace, and cherishing the dream of a miraculous windfall of money and better life. Deprivation and abandonment of our fellow countrymen can be observed everywhere.
Very soon after their arrival in the great metropolitan areas, these children will have to face the hard reality, and gradually their beautiful dream will become a nightmare. Once their dreams vanish, they will have to consent to sacrifice morality and ethics and sink systematically into prostitution, corruption, and many other degraded inhuman practices in order to survive.
Through the years, they become a great menace for the entire society. They will be used by corrupt politicians for staged protests, drug selling, rioting, assassinations, and threatening hard-working citizens in order to sway their opinions. And the more in need these children are, the more they will be abused.
Because we are convinced that it is always better to light a candle than to criticize and condemn the darkness, we, as sons and daughters in love with Haiti, decided to create GRODYSH (GROup DYnamic Pour La Survie d’Haiti) as an alternative, a new chance of survival that we are proud to present to our brothers and sisters. We give children the chance to have a high-quality basic education, a high level of professional education (such as electrician, plumber, carpentry, etc.) to permit them to provide for their needs and their family’s needs, and to contribute to the quality of life in their region, and to the entire society.
We dare say that the darkness over this country came from the lack of opportunity offered to a population that has had to find its way by itself, suffering from indifference from the society.
In January of 2000, Claude Reginald (Reggie) Jean, who had been involved in many humanitarian activities with members of his family, decided to assemble a group of ethical young people, and officially launch GRODYSH to address all the problems he observed in Haiti. GRODYSH activities include reforestation, distribution of tools, seeds and fertilizer for planting crops, soil conservation, protection of the environment, providing education for those who cannot afford it, trade studies, life improvement seminars, seminars on administrative tools, supporting orphanages to provide shelter for orphans and kids living on the street, low-cost or free health centers, food distribution, a credit union and other community activities.
GRODYSH had supported hundreds of families and orphanages when on January 12, 2010, an earthquake devastated Haiti. Reggie Jean started an orphanage on his property not far from the international airport Toussaint L’Ouverture in Port-au-Prince, with the support of some volunteers who came to Haiti to help in the relief efforts. Because of the risk of flooding, Reggie decided to move his family to the United States and turn his residence into an orphanage which he named the Future OF Haiti Orphanage (FOHO).
The volunteers raised funds to manage FOHO, which had 130 kids and 15 personnel. The volunteers were not able to stay, and they left in July, along with the financial support. GRODYSH staff had to communicate with some international NGOs (non-governmental organizations) operating in Haiti to find support (food, clothing and medical assistance) for this activity. Unable to pay for the orphans to go to school, GRODYSH has founded its own school on its premises, called Humanitarian Institution Theta. This provides education to the orphans and also below-poverty-level children in surrounding neighborhoods, from kindergarten up to high school.
We are working to make FOHO the world’s first self-sustaining orphanage. In June 2011 we installed a 120-chicken coop to guarantee some food for the children. We have an organic gardener who will be donating her services to plan and help plant an organic fruit and vegetable garden for the children soon. And we are currently raising funds to install an onsite bakery to bake our own bread, and also to bake bread and cookies to be sold.
Because of the difficulties encountered in Haiti, and the willingness of some people that we contacted in the U.S. to support our humanitarian activities, we decided to create Int’l, Inc. We incorporated in the state of Florida on January 1, 2011, and received IRS 501(c)(3) status and are an approved charitable organization. The H in became humanity (GROup DYnamic for the Survival of Humanity) in the U.S. because we have observed that poverty, orphans, illiteracy, etc. are concerns everywhere. So we envision a very powerful organization supported by many powerful people for the purpose of supporting not only Haiti, but other third-world countries.
