History of the Haiti Response Coalition

After the devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti in 2010, many organizations working across the country came together through the Haiti Response Coalition to provide emergency support to the hardest hit communities. At the beginning, sixty organizations gathered over three days to strategize about how to make sure the humanitarian response could be Haitian led and could have long-term impacts even when delivering rapid, urgently needed solutions.

Under the leadership of a few key organizations including Beyond Borders and the Quixote Center, and with Melinda Miles playing a coordination role, the Haiti Response Coalition provided a physical space for collaboration in Haiti’s capital in the form of both a Coalition community house and office space, as well as weekly coordination phone calls bringing people together in Haiti, the US and beyond. The HRC had a field office in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic for several months to leverage support from the government and humanitarian organizations in DR, including navy boats and surgical volunteers who were the first to arrive in Jacmel after the earthquake.

In 2010, the Haiti Response Coalition hired a team of skilled Haitian community organizers, or animatè, to lead outreach and coordination with the self-determined leadership of displaced people in both temporary and long-term camps. Coalition members advocated for the human rights of the most vulnerable in the aftermath of the earthquake and sought to hold donors and the Haitian government accountable for the billions of dollars of aid pouring into the country at that time.

In addition, the Haiti Response Coalition participated in the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) cluster system for more than a year after the earthquake. HRC members raised issues and advocated on behalf of the most vulnerable Haitians in protection, shelter, and other distribution related cluster meetings. In many cases, the HRC brought Haitian representatives to meetings that otherwise were only attended by internationals.

Some of the most active member groups in Haiti Response Coalition in 2010 included: Beyond Borders, Quixote Center, KONPAY, AJWS, SOIL, Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG), Community Coalition for Haiti, Haiti Communitere, MCC Haiti, IAT, Li Li Li Read, SAKALA, TransAfrica Forum, IJDH, CEPR, and many others. Dozens of unaffiliated individuals including investigative journalists, teams of human rights lawyers, groups visiting to provide services and long-term volunteers, also worked through the HRC and many were housed in the HRC house in Delmas during that time.

In addition to providing emergency relief, the Haiti Response Coalition created a substantial archive of on-the-ground reports that amplified the voices of the people most affected by the earthquake and the humanitarian response that followed. Publications included studies, articles, interviews and even books (for one example, see “Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake” co-edited by Mark Schuller with contributions from many in our Coalition community). 

While the HRC continued for a year after the earthquake, the group stopped using the physical infrastructure as many of the member organizations either moved into their own independent spaces in Port-au-Prince or returned to their pre-earthquake activities in other areas. Members of the Coalition gravitated to other spaces for coordination and information sharing, including the Haiti Advocacy Working Group and Let Haiti Live calls.

However, when the coronavirus began to spread across the world in early 2020, there was no other existing space for groups gearing up to respond to the crisis to share information and collaborate for a unified response. David Diggs at Beyond Borders and Melinda Miles reconnected and decided the time was right to gather friends and colleagues to coordinate. The Haiti Response Coalition was revived in April 2020.