Samasource in Haiti: It’s funny how things turn out sometimes

A few days ago, we set up a conference call to evaluate potential Service Partners that we’d interviewed in the previous weeks. Each of the Screening Committee members had been assigned an applicant and at this meeting we were going to discuss our findings, do some ranking, and move on to the next step of the partnership process.

The meeting was set for Tuesday afternoon, Jan 11^th, and I was preparing for it by reviewing  copious notes from the interview that I had conducted with the applicant that I had been assigned: “1000 Jobs/Haiti”.  I was reminded again how promising a partnership with them would be.  The interview with Jacky Poteau, head of  1000 Jobs/Haiti, and his partner Bob, had painted a vivid picture for me of the opportunities for Samasource in Haiti.  The inspiration for 1000 Jobs stemmed from Bob’s initiative in 2007, where he recruited a group of women to create beautiful embroidered purses and bags. He would pay for them up front and then sell the goods in the US, thus helping the women earn an income.  What started out as a small group of women had now grown into 3 groups and around 75 women by the end of 2009. He felt that this job creation model could help Haitians and he had other ideas that he was also considering. When funding became available for a modest computer centre to help alleviate poverty for other groups of Haitians (youth and women) Bob and Jacky went searching for a partnership that would help one of these ideas along. Hence their application to Samasource as a Service Partner.

Their score on the initial screening was high due to their nonprofit status, and the fact that they would have a lab available with the requisite computers and Internet access. Further, as Haiti was just a short trip from Miami, our site visit and training costs would be reasonable. My interview painted a more intriguing picture. The demographic that they were thinking of was mainly students – youth who were interested and keen to work on computers but whom, without a project to work on, ran the risk of wasting away their potential. There was a personal connection as well – the much-loved and respected Governor General in Canada is Haitian and her two trips to her hometown were a much publicized event: photographs of her dancing in the street with the locals were a searing reminder of how being a Canadian means having a global perspective. Having recently moved to California from Canada, I was really keen on this tenuous yet visible connection. From a business perspective 1000 Jobs/Haiti was also very appealing in that the students spoke English, French and Creole and some of our Sales leads involved French.

The internal meeting on Tuesday ended with a nod for two applicants to go to the next stage of the process. 1000 Jobs/Haiti was one of them.  I fired off an email to Jacky and Bob informing them of the good news and scheduling a site visit and next steps.  Twenty minutes later, the first reports of the earthquake came through.  At first the news was sketchy and then the grim reality set in. We had not heard back from Jacky at all.  I focused on other tasks and dared not think beyond “the phones are down” and “the internet is down” as the reason for his silence. Life of course can keep you busy with mundane tasks.

Three days later, and just two hours ago as we post this, I got a call from Leila, our founder, who had heard from Jacky and he was ok.  Jacky has been sending regular email updates from Haiti, and reports that the town of Mirebalais, where the program is based, was unaffected by the quake but has received thousands of displaced people. There’s more of a case than ever for Samasource in Haiti – hopefully, Jacky’s emails are a sign of good things to come with 1000 Jobs. And we just got word that CrowdFlower, a venture-backed startup that helps companies outsource microtasks, has teamed up with Samasource, to rapidly provide paid work to Haitian participants in the program. The project will use a volunteer labor force to perform quality assurance on these tasks through an innovative iPhone application, GiveWork. Over 21,000 people have downloaded GiveWork to complete tasks in their spare time to help refugees in Kenya — now, the same application will benefit victims of the earthquake in Haiti. It’s funny how things turn out sometimes.