A few weeks ago, I spoke with Sue Frame, co-founder of an arts organization in Haiti, over video conference late one evening. She unveiled for me the stirring story of how her nonprofit came to be, and the surprising motivation that keeps it going.
The leadership lessons in her story are many, and they are also profound lessons in being human. I plan on including as many of those as I can, because when you get insights this beautiful, you want everyone to hear them. So get comfortable!
To set the story: Jakmel Ekspresyon, the name of her organization, means “the expression of Jakmel”. It gives the people of Jakmel (and surrounding areas) the artistic means to express themselves in a space that actively protects and empowers their voice.
JE is a “space of nondiscrimination in a country where women expect to be beaten as a norm,” Sue says, “where people openly say ‘homosexuals should be killed or leave the country’, and were the common word for handicap roughly translates to the word trash.”
It is a safe haven, where otherwise, simply being who you are can put you in danger.
JE fills a need that other organizations don’t fill: it provides a respect-filled place for all people- including marginalized people- to build community and express themselves. It offers painting, drawing, screen printing, martial arts, dance, sewing,… the list goes on.
It’s also 70% run by local Haitians, and “where the majority of non-profits have pulled out”, Jamel Ekspresyon is still going strong.
How did Sue, who had never run a non-profit before co-founding it years ago, figure out how to beat the odds and succeed?
Sue shared with me the life-changing experience she had that ignited a dream, and what it still takes to keep that dream alive. There’s a lot to her story that you wouldn’t expect, which is fitting, since what’s remarkable about Sue is her ability to embrace all the things she can’t expect.
Sue is ruthlessly honest, approaches challenges with a generous sense of humor, and is fiercely committed to the people she works with.
But what I find most inspiring about Sue’s leadership is her humility.
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Sue Frame survived the earthquake of 2010 in Haiti. She was there with her best friend, who didn’t make it.
That moment, for many reasons, this is the beginning of her story. And it’s the beginning of her work in Haiti.
“…you know, I ran out of a building and it collapsed and I could have been dead. I watched my best friend die. Most people have survivor’s guilt. Most people question why they’re not dead. That never happened for me….I never thought ‘I could have been dead in that moment’. Someone said to me this was Flo’s time to die, and I was like, ‘of course it was because he’s dead’. But that also meant that it wasn’t mine. Mine was to be there because I was his best friend and help him on. So I did my best friend job.
“But in the next three or four days I swear to God, Julie, I was guided by the universe. Three days before, I went through this Voodoo ceremony with this houngan (Voodoo Priest). And the houngan picked me out and said “You are going to need the love of Erzuli. So I did this ceremony, and I was like f—- yeah, love, I’m all about it.”
“So then three days later I was like ‘I’ve got to do this with a lot of love, or I’m not gonna make it through it’. So then I’m not freaking out about death, and I’m kinda freaking out that I’m not freaking out about death, and everyone is telling me I should be worrying about this shit but I’m not, because that day, Flo died and I didn’t. That’s just the way it is. It wasn’t my time. So I’m like ‘what am I gonna take away from this? There’s gotta be a takeaway’.
“And I thought about Flo in that moment of death. And I think about if they say it’s true that you dream your whole life at that moment of death, if that’s seriously some real shit, then I want that to be the most beautiful dream I have ever had in my entire life.”
…Have you caught your breath yet?
(I’ll give you a minute.)
It was after this event, after having developed friendships with so many people in Haiti, after having lost her best friend who ran an arts organization, after watching someone step into her friend’s now-empty position as director only to treat it like a dictatorship and cause the safety of the space to vanish, that she and seven Haitian friends decided to start their own organization.
They’ve weathered major setbacks, like theft, and a rumors of a voodoo hex that forced them out of their location only one year after inception, but now JE now proudly has 2 administrators, brings about 10 international teaching volunteers to Jakmel each year, has a screen printing program committee run by 6 of their graduates, and approximately 100 students…plus “40 little kids for the summer camp”.
JE has evolved and revised and improved itself with a vengeance. Under Sue’s leadership, it relentlessly examines and meets the needs of its community.
That’s because nonprofit work is tricky business for a place like Haiti. Simply having the vision of a dream won’t do. There’s reality to contend with.
Here’s what I mean. Since setting foot on Haiti’s soil, Sue has learned to never stop studying impact: her impact, the impact of nonprofits, the impact of being a white person in Haiti- and the unintended impact that can come with trying to do good across the divides of race, nationality, sexual-orientation, age, gender, and class.
There, things are never as simple as you hope them to be.
Which is why she’s made failure her best friend.
She looks to it like a GPS to point her to any course-correction needed for success. She has learned to depend on the honest feedback of failure so much that she not only creates room for it into her own leadership style, but also her training and teaching approach.
She wants her people out there failing and learning from it.
And the combination of those two attributes of her leadership style makes her pretty fearless in the face of life’s unexpected twists. She’s all in. Heart, body and soul, she is willing to learn and to be changed.
Sue’s story starts with a dream, but finishes long with patience, grit, and the messy work of growth. She thrives in the muddy land where we tend to experience doubt: when the real challenges rise up and shake us.
Today I’ll share with you three areas where Sue’s insights stand out- three key takeaways to managing challenges and using them to your benefit.
They are study your impact, let failure be your guide, and be willing to be changed.
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Study Your Impact
Even before the earthquake, Sue started noticing the impact of people trying to do good in Haiti. “I always gave a surface view of nonprofits, like oh, they’re all good people going out and getting stuff done”, she says.
But that view started to unravel with the time she spent talking to the friends she’d made there. She realized that “Well… sometimes they’re good people who just don’t think about [their impact].”
She had noticed, for example, what happened when her Italian-born friend Flo (who died in the earthquake), became director of an art center there. “…Flo, who was transgendered queer stepped in and took over the directorship and then I started realizing the structure that was happening there, because everyone looked to Flo, to say ‘you make something happen for us.”
That impact, albeit unintended, didn’t sit right with her.
“I used to call him Papa Flo, because I swear to God I’m surprised they didn’t go to the bathroom without asking. And when the earthquake came, Flo ran back for his credit card, you know, because that was the only thing supporting the arts center… and he died because of that last thought…. because he was the life of the center.”
After the earthquake, “a new director put himself in charge and changed the [title] to Presidente… He took it over and kicked out all the queers, all the handicapped people, and said women are ok…you can get a date off the women so women can come, but none of the women came because it was such a hostile environment.”
When Sue and her friends there decided to open JE, they set out to make a different impact. Through conversations about what was really needed, a vision emerged.
“We said, you know, Flo really built this space. It’s something that was never there before. And now, because Flo is gone, there’s a void. So it was me and seven Haitians who decided we should have an art center that was a space of nondiscrimination… a space where you don’t have to be a bourgeois international to have a voice… the local Jakmelians should have a voice… they should run workshops and teach each other.”
She envisioned an organization built on truly empowering relationships. But Sue would tell you that moving from dream to reality is not a fast or easy process. She’d already learned from her friend Flow how easy it was to create dependency.
It’s also easy to create a negative impact even with good intentions. Early on, Sue was awarded a $6800 grant, and then it was stolen from her by the Haitian who cosigned on it. That in itself could dampen your spirit, if you let it.
But for Sue, it’s an opportunity to see the bigger picture and acknowledge the impact made before her.
“You have to realize”, she says, “that all these people who are out there, especially queer people, man, they’re fighting for every single thing they have, so like, that’s their neuropathways, that’s how they think, they’re like ‘you’re eventually gonna [screw] me over, I’ll get what I can off you now… I know you’re gonna leave anyway.’
“The white people don’t come and stay. You know. They come, and have utopian ideas and build projects and probably 80% of them leave in five years, without creating any sustainability.”
So that’s the negative impact left by the influx of nonprofit work. Like the case of her stolen grant, things happen for a reason. Sue studies those reasons.
She noticed, also, how Internationals had been paying more, for things like motorcycle taxi rides and rent, out of generosity. But the ultimate impact it created was higher prices for everyone, which edged locals out of opportunities.
This is what makes creating the dream of helping others more like an elaborate puzzle than a straightforward gift of the heart. There are a lot pieces at work. You have to be willing to learn how they fit together, and you have to be willing to see your impact, so you can wield it responsibly.
Let Failure Be Your Guide
“You know, if this job is easy, you’re not doing it right”, Sue says. “We’re failing all over the place. It should be intrinsically difficult to do this.”
It’s too easy to think you’re doing great, when you’re not. And that has a lot to do with the nature of working across a history of deep rooted cultural biases and race-based power differentials. For Sue, that’s risky business.
“I could go off on the nonprofit world and how absolutely horrifyingly corrupt it is”, she says “and how we need to stop treating the third world like a testing lab, personal guinea pigs, and go in and dictate projects without even getting to know the people you’re dealing with, or being friends with them or being in community with them.”
“I have to question all the time who I am. I mean, I do this on a weekly basis- who am I? And why am I making these decisions? Is this a decision I should be making or my team should be making? Am I basing this off of my culture? Or their culture? Have I talked to my team about this decision to see if that’s something they want?”
That’s why, when Sue’s failures come to light, she embraces it as a chance to learn and close the gap between cultures a little more.
“I’m of the firm belief that if you’re only one person you have 100% potential. If you’re two people you have 200% potential. The same is true for cultures. You know, if I know somebody else’s culture, I can understand life better. I can be much better, fuller, rounder person, you know, through that exploration.”
Take, for example, what happened when Sue’s former Teaching Assistant (from the art school Sue works at full time) approached her about going to Haiti to teach sewing.
First, when the student approached Sue enthusiastically with her idea, Sue told her “you might have a really great idea, but until you know the people and what happens there, does your project have any relevance in the community?”
She told her “If you want to do this, you need to come down with me. You need to have meetings with my students. You need to sit and listen to them and understand how they feel and what’s relevant to their life and their community and their potential.”
Now, what Sue knew already was that this was an opportunity for her students to make costumes for dance.
“I can’t even tell you how many dance groups there are in Jackmel…” she says, “there are all these people with money for Carnival… and all of them need new costumes and outfits for their performances. We can cater to that and build a business for that in Jackmel.”
But testing ideas in reality and learning from failure is something Sue uses as a teaching tool, and so she had the former TA visit Jackal to see for herself whether her idea would work. She visited this past January, to discover for herself if her project was relevant.
When it comes to learning, failure is the name of the game, so she doesn’t shield herself or anyone else from its feedback.
I ask Sue how she recovers after her own big failures. She answers without having to think.
“Apologize, be humble, communicate, and be open to change.”
She told me the story of when a volunteer from Trinidad, fresh out of art school, came to Jakmel to teach a screen printing class. She had great technical skills, but being new to teaching, young and even physically small, and she lost control of the classroom. There was a lot of energy and singing, and she couldn’t reign it in, so she got loud, forceful, and very authoritarian.
The students didn’t respond well to that. It shut the class down.
“Do you know who we are?” they said. “We’re Haitian! You can’t tell us what to do because we’re free people! How dare you!”
Sue arrived a few days into the screen printing class, and met with the students to see what happened. Not surprisingly, the story wasn’t as clear as it looked from the outside. It wasn’t the teaching that was problem.
By then Sue had come to identify what the students said to their teacher as a typical expression of stress. She’d heard those words before pointed at her. So she got curious. What were they really stressed about?
It turned out that the students had been worn down by trying to adjust to an different system of classroom accountability. The system wasn’t Haitian, it was American.
In the Haitian system, if you fail a class, you don’t get to officially graduate from the program, but you can continue to move onto the next classes in the program. Sue was using an American system, where you don’t graduate to the next class until you’ve completed the first.
But the American system depends on consistent attendance and punctuality. Students who were traveling from the mountains to take her classes couldn’t always arrive on time, and students with weak health (an all-too common problem) couldn’t make it to every class.
They were constantly under fear of not making the requirements.
Sue says of when she realized this: “I was like, RIGHT! OH. OHHHHHHHHH! This has been going on for a while! And then someone pissed them off and they reacted, because of all this other stress.”
So what at first glance seemed like a teacher’s dilemma was actually an unintended consequence of her own program design! There it was: failure.
Apologize. Be humble. Communicate. Be open to change…
She assembled her students and her Haitian director, and together they created new guidelines that included room for her students to fail at making their attendance requirements but make up for it with additional homework assignments.
Through collaboration and conversation, she found a way to make it work for them while not giving up on her overall vision. She wanted her students graduating from this program having grown. Failure means learning and moving forward, not giving up.
“I need them to be excellent,” she told her director. “And in nine months.”
Be Willing to Be Changed
“A long time ago, I took a look at [this work], and said I need to get something out of this. I can’t just give, you know, because I just went through an earthquake, I’ll all PTSD, I’m emotionally traumatized, and I already have a full time job.” She’s no stranger to exhaustion.
“And the thing that got me there was like, you know, it’s the right thing to do.
“The second thing was, when people talk about Haitians, they’re talking about my friends.”
Love for her Haitian community fuels her. But it’s the ongoing gift of growth that sustains her personally.
Take her current conundrum as an example. She started an entrepreneurial screen printing program to launch her students into the working world. They built a production studio to use, with the expectation that her students would get out, find buyers and start selling.
“I need them to feel the deal” she says, as she tells me the story. “But then that’s not happening. Why are my students not going out there and getting jobs?”
There’s that questioning again.
“It’s because they’re middle to lower class Haitians. It’s not culturally appropriate for them to approach a bourgeois. How does my American self feel about that, and how am I answering that question? I have to ask myself in that moment.”
“That’s what I get out of it.”
The work- and the self-reflection it demands- changes her. She says that helps her to “understand me better…how life works better, so I can navigate my world and the people in it, and be understanding and compassionate and empathetic.”
It helps her be a better person. It’s all for the sake of making her life into the most beautiful dream she can. It’s exactly what she signed up for.
“…I think about if they say it’s true that you dream your whole life at that moment of death, if that’s seriously some real shit, then I want that to be the most beautiful dream I have ever had in my entire life.”
“That means a whole bunch of hard stuff, an a whole bunch of beautiful stuff, and a whole bunch of really potent shit, you know, and rich, rich experience, and Haiti provides that for me as well.”
Sue smiles big when she talks about how messy this work is, like her favorite part of doing it is being humbled.
“If I fall on my face in a major way a few times a year, then I’m going to have an amazing life, you know?”
