Fleur De Vie launches mental health intervention for Port-au-Prince school communities

Fleur De Vie has launched a trauma-focused mental health program targeting educators, students and parents at schools in Port-au-Prince as gang violence and displacement continue to destabilize daily life across Haiti’s capital.

Fleur De Vie, a nonprofit organization focused on education and health in Haiti, is partnering with the Institut de Développement Personnel et Organisationnel, known as IDEO Foundation, to deliver psychological support to school communities struggling to function amid the ongoing crisis. The United Methodist Committee on Relief is providing funding support for the initiative.

The program takes a three-tiered approach. Psychologists are working directly with teachers who are navigating personal displacement and violence while trying to maintain stable classrooms. Students receive trauma-informed care to help them process exposure to systemic violence and instability. Parents and caregivers are given resources to help manage the psychological effects of the crisis at home, with the goal of building resilience across the entire family unit.

“We are seeing an unprecedented level of trauma,” said Dayanne Danier, founder of Fleur De Vie, in a press release. “Teachers are working under fire, families are being displaced, and the chronic uncertainty is suffocating the classroom.”

The underlying premise of the program is that children cannot thrive when the adults around them are in crisis. Fleur De Vie says that without addressing the psychological needs of teachers and parents alongside students, any educational intervention risks falling short.

The initiative builds on earlier mental health seminars Fleur De Vie conducted with IDEO at IMA/KKMS, a Port-au-Prince school. Staff there said those sessions helped them recover a sense of confidence and emotional stability that carried over into their work with students and families. The current crisis, Danier said, has made that kind of support far more urgent.

“Our past seminars with the IDEO team at IMA/KKMS showed us the cracks,” she said. “The current crisis has broken the dam.”

IDEO Foundation, founded in 1992 and with more than 20 mental health professionals on its team, is providing the clinical expertise for the program. Its director emphasized that what Port-au-Prince residents are experiencing goes well beyond ordinary stress.

“The population is not facing simple stress, but incessant, deeply traumatic events that have created a state of chronic trauma,” said Roseline Benjamin, psychologist and director of IDEO. “Our goal is to help this community heal from emotional wounds and prevent the transmission of trauma, building a generation of Haitians who will not merely survive, but truly flourish.”

The program’s cultural grounding is central to its design. IDEO’s localized expertise is meant to ensure that care is relevant to the specific social and psychological context Haitian families are living through, rather than imported from outside frameworks that may not fit.

The launch follows a 2024 nationwide survey by Rassamble Pou Ayiti — a coalition of 12 women-led nonprofits that includes Fleur De Vie — which found a significant shift in how Haitians view mental health care. For years, mental health remained a cultural taboo in Haiti. The survey found that the population is now broadly acknowledging psychological support as a necessity rather than a luxury, a change advocates say reflects just how severe conditions on the ground have become.

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