It is said that doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Cathy Parrill thinks it’s time to change the way charities try to help countries like Haiti, because what’s been done for years hasn’t worked.
“I did development work in Haiti starting about 25 years ago,” says Parrill, a Birmingham resident. She says the model used by most charities for providing aid to Haitian communities has been ineffective, even though hundreds of organizations work in the island nation. “All of our efforts haven’t fixed [poverty]. It’s growing,” she says. “What do we do? We’ve tried so much.”
Parrill, executive director of Sylvan Learning Centers in Birmingham, Hoover, Huntsville and Trussville, also works with officials at the Tarrant City Schools, where Sylvan runs after-school and summer programs.
A former choral teacher who has taught in several states, Parrill’s teaching took her Haiti and the welfare of that country has been a major personal concern ever since. Recently she hosted a workshop about how to bring change to Haiti and other impoverished nations. The workshop started with a group of visitors from around the U.S. and outside the country who met in her home before taking field research trips to other states.
Parrill had visited Haiti before, but really became involved in 1990, when she was asked to conduct teacher workshops there.
She was involved with a partnership with the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee that resulted in the establishment of St. Marc School in Jeannette, Haiti. The school began with seven children attending class under a tree without even books to use. Today, it provides education for preschoolers through high school students.
Parrill’s growing interest and involvement in Haiti resulted in her taking a sabbatical from her teaching job to go to Haiti and train teachers. She ended up teaching choral music at a school in Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital, and training teachers on weekends. She lived in Haiti for two years.
During her time there, she founded the Haitian Young Men’s Vocal Ensemble, Meli Melomane, which she took on tour in the U.S. The group performed for more than 35,000 American schoolchildren. Parrill and the choral group drew the attention of officials at the University of Kansas, which gave the Haitian students scholarships and Parrill a doctoral fellowship in choral conducting in 1998.
After her return to the U.S., Parrill lost touch with her contacts in Haiti. She reconnected in 2009 and discovered that nothing had really changed in the nation, which became the first black republic when it gained independence in 1804. It has a long history of poverty.
Parrill says the model used to help impoverished people needs to be changed to one that looks at the entire picture of the areas to be helped and provides assistance from the bottom up. She calls many efforts to help areas like Haiti “toxic charity” because it starts from good intentions but doesn’t bring about change.
Charities need to find out from the people they want to help what they actually want and need. “Always use an inquiry-based approach, not a solutions-based one,” she says.
“It is essential to distinguish between crisis and chronic need, and respond differently, and appropriately, in each instance,” Parrill says. “Responding to chronic need with charity creates dependence, harms local cultures and economies and rarely if ever creates sustainable improvement.”
Parrill says conditions in Haiti are deeper than just poverty. “There are no jobs in Haiti,” she says. “Their land is depleted.”
Parrill recently hosted a three-day workshop called “Enough Is Enough” that brought participants from Haiti, Zimbabwe and other locations in the United States to focus primarily on eco-agriculture and education.
“We are looking through a spiritual lens that emphasizes research in…restoration of depleted resources, creation of parallel systems for those that seem too broken to be transformed from within and using a model that draws out strengths rather than problem-solves by identifying weaknesses,” she says.
The group – which doesn’t have a name yet – is planning to pilot agricultural research projects that offer a different model of education. “We explored similar soil and environmental conditions in the southeast region of the USA and in the southern peninsula of Haiti,” Parrill says.
“Depletion of land in Georgia and Alabama through cotton plantations has resulted in a soil very similar to that around Jeannette. Weather conditions have many similarities as well. For that reason, we believe partnering between these two localities can have benefits for all.”
Workshop participants visited two programs they believe have promise in helping improve Haiti’s situation. The first, Spring Valley EcoFarms in Athens, Ga., is a farm that focuses on sustainable agriculture. Parrill says Spring Valley uses techniques like companion planting, which involves planting two crops side by side that have different effects on the soil. For example, one crop that depletes an element from the soil can be paired with a crop that adds that same element back into the soil.
She says the group has established a relationship with Carl Jordan, the farm’s operator, an ecologist at the University of Georgia and author of An Ecosystem Approach to Sustainable Architecture. Jordan is willing to provide internships for Haitians on his farm, teaching the interns methods that would replenish depleted soil and prevent future depletion.
Parrill notes that eco-agriculture can be very labor intensive, but says Haiti has the labor needed to work farms and produce crops that can help feed the hungry nation. The interns, who would come two at a time, would be able to return to Haiti and use the methods they learned at Spring Valley to begin farming in Haiti.
“As we restore the land, then it grows more food,” she says.
She says the need for housing is another big problem in Haiti. The workshop participants visited Auburn University’s Rural Studio program in Hale County. Established two decades ago to design affordable housing using local resources, the program has built more than 150 projects and provided training for more than 600 architectural students. Designs have included the use of materials like hay bales in the walls of houses.
Plans also call for bringing interns from Haiti to learn about the way Rural Studio provides housing and other structures in one of the poorest counties in the U.S. Like the farm interns, the architectural interns would come two at a time and then return to Haiti to begin using Rural Studio’s methods.
With more than 40 years in education, Parrill, 65, sees a great need for changes in the way schools teach students in nations like Haiti. She believes rote learning and other forms of what she calls “top-down education” don’t support self-reliance and the development of creativity and intellectual strengths. Instead, she says, “dialogue-based inquiry educational methods” work better.
As part of the group’s efforts, Parrill will work with other educational experts and attempt to collaborate with local groups and institutions in Haiti.
She says participants in Zimbabwe plan to carry out the same kinds of research and activities there, since soil conditions and issues parallel those in Haiti.
Parrill is available to give three talks related to her work, as well as to conduct workshops for charitable groups and foundations that are examining models of philanthropic response to poverty and need.
The talk topics include, first, rethinking charitable giving in the wake of growing awareness of failures of charity. The second topic involves rethinking education in development projects and connecting schools globally. The third is a workshop and case study designed for charitable groups whose results have not be satisfactory or who are seeking a new way to respond to poverty.
Parrill knows she has a lot of work ahead in getting her group organized, including selecting a name, developing a website and so forth. She’s committed, though, to making it happen. “This is my hobby,” she says. “It’s becoming my life.”
For more information on Parrill’s group or speaking engagements, email her at cparrill@gmail.com.