It Starts with Schools

Experience the Episode

Presented by

Friday, January 10, 2025 12:00 pm

Notre Dame’s involvement in education in Haiti began 2006,  with support for Catholic schools. When the 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti, Notre Dame responded by helping to rebuild Basile Moreau, the Congregation of the Holy Cross’ flagship K-12 school, as well as broader engagement with Haiti’s Catholic schools in rural areas of the country. The Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child’s strategic education partnerships now extend to over 300 school communities—over 200 of which are Catholic. Listen in to a conversation focused  on school-based work which began with the implementation and study of the impact of an early grade literacy program in Catholic schools in Haiti.

The University of Notre Dame’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child  works to create pathways out of adversity for the world’s most vulnerable children in 25 countries around the world, leveraging evidence-based innovations to develop effective Whole Child Development (WCD) approaches to not only advance children’s academic achievement, but also create safe, supportive, and equitable family, school, and community environments. Join Kate Schuenke-Lucien, Director for Haiti and Senior Associate Director for Strategic Planning, and Tamara Doucet-Larozar, Associate Director of Language and Learning Education, for Forging a Future in Haiti and uncover Notre Dame’s history in Haiti, insights from the work that has been done to bolster the resilience of Haitian children and families, and why there is reason to hope.

Forging a Future in Haiti is sponsored on ThinkND by the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child, located within the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame.

Meet the Moderator: Kate Schuenke-Lucien

Kate Schuenke-Lucien is the Director for Haiti and Senior Associate Director for Strategic Planning at the University of Notre Dame’s Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child. Since 2012, she and her team have implemented education programs in Haiti focused on early grade literacy, social-emotional learning, early childhood development, and community engagement. Kate led a mother-tongue early grade reading program, Read to Learn, in two Haitian dioceses from 2014 to 2016 that showed dramatic improvements in reading skills for participating students. The strong results of Read to Learn led to an investment of over $30 million by public and private donors for programming in Haiti. Since 2016, GC-DWC Haiti programming in 350 school communities has benefitted over 120,00 students across five dioceses.

Before joining the GC-DWC team, Kate worked for Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies coordinating the University’s response to the January 2010 earthquake and for the Notre Dame Haiti Program, a public health initiative focused on the elimination of lymphatic filariasis.

Kate was a Rotary Foreign Exchange student in Bangkok, Thailand, from 1997 to 1998, studied abroad in Còrdoba, Argentina in 1999, and interned for the U.S. State Department at the Embassy in Bangkok in 2000. After graduating from Wheaton College, summa cum laude, with a degree in political science and Spanish in 2002, she taught at a Haitian K-12 school and provided adult education courses in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. She went on to earn a master’s degree in Latin American studies from Tulane University in 2005, where she was a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow for Haitian Creole. Kate is fluent in both Haitian Creole and Spanish, and is currently a PhD candidate (ABD) in political science at the University of Notre Dame. She resides in Chicago with her husband, son, and daughter and serves on the school board for St. Procopius Catholic School, a dual-language (Spanish/English) pre-K to 8 academy in the Pilsen neighborhood.

Meet the Speaker: Tamara Doucet-Larozar

Tamara Doucet-Larozar is a passionate educator with over a decade of experience focused on improving learning outcomes and environment for vulnerable youth in underserved communities, and building local organizations’ management approach and systems. Before joining the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC) as the Associate Director of Language and Learning Education, she most recently served as Acting Education Chief and Senior Education Advisor at the USAID/Haiti Mission, where she advocated for social emotional learning, flexible and cross-sectoral programming, distance learning, and increasing access to quality and equitable education for vulnerable youth that is holistically tailored to their needs in the context of their environment, particularly at risk and out of school youth. These concepts were integrated into USAID/Haiti’s new education strategy and flagship activity. Throughout her five years at USAID, she earned four Embassy Mission awards for her team and individual accomplishments and a culminating appreciation certificate.

Her dedication to vulnerable youth in underserved and low-income countries emerged from her Brooklyn immigrant roots, and from understanding and addressing students’ learning gaps and corresponding behavioral learning challenges that were left unresolved, at times unidentified, within the poor primary education services received. She consistently witnessed its negative impact throughout her teaching experience as an English Second Language Teacher to Haitian adults in Brooklyn right after the 2010 earthquake, as an English Fellow at the Haitian Education and Leadership Program to college students in Haiti, and throughout her USAID experience managing literacy projects.

She holds a Bachelor’s in International Relations and African Studies from the College of William and Mary and a Master’s of Science in Nonprofit Management and Global Policy from the New School of Public Engagement. She is fluent in French and Haitian Kreyol along with basic Spanish. She lives by the following motto: life is a two-way street, you contribute and you learn from all that you do and receive.