Who we are
A school rebuilt after the earthquake. A promise that outlasted it.
Haiti Scholarships grew out of disaster-relief work in Léogâne. When the rebuilding was done, the volunteers kept a quieter promise: to keep the children in the school they had helped raise.
How it began
From BonaResponds to a classroom that stayed open.
After the 2010 earthquake, volunteers from BonaResponds, the relief group founded at St. Bonaventure University after Hurricane Katrina, traveled to Léogâne to help rebuild a school.
Putting up walls was the easy part. Keeping students inside them was harder: in Haiti, school costs money, and the families could not pay. So a small group of those volunteers built a scholarship program to cover the fees, and Haiti Scholarships was born.
Today it is a 501(c)(3) charity run almost entirely by volunteers, with a coordinator on the ground in Haiti.
What we do, in one line
“We pay the school fees that keep Haitian students in class, and we keep paying as long as they keep showing up and passing.”
Haiti Scholarships
Board of directors
A working board of volunteers, most of whom found their way to Haiti through the same relief work.
Julie Faughnan
Retired from IBM after 30 years and worked as a procurement consultant for the University of California Health Systems. Her connection to Haiti began through her son Greg’s volunteer work in Léogâne. Married to Don for 37 years, she counts her three sons as her biggest accomplishment.
Greg Faughnan
First went to Haiti through St. Bonaventure University and BonaResponds, helping rebuild a school in Léogâne. A graduate of St. Bonaventure and SUNY Upstate Medical University, he now works as a family medicine physician in Syracuse, New York.
Jerry Godbout
Introduced to disaster-relief volunteering by Jim Mahar and BonaResponds after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He holds a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from Michigan State, and teaches chemistry.
Jim Mahar
Founder and leader of BonaResponds, the volunteer organization started after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. An associate professor of finance at St. Bonaventure University, with a Ph.D. from Penn State and an MBA from the University of Rochester.
Deronce Jean Porky
Born in Les Cayes, where he has been the program’s area coordinator since 2017. He tracks student performance and the payments to schools, and was added to the board in 2026. More on him below.
Wesly Jean Louis
A Haitian educator, humanitarian, and entrepreneur, born in Port-au-Prince and raised in Léogâne. He co-founded Collège JIM Mahar and founded Institution Mixte Jim Wesley to widen access to education in Haiti, worked with the UN for ten years, and now serves with Clark County Job and Family Services.
On the ground
Deronce Jean Porky
Deronce Jean Porky is the backbone of our operations in Haiti. He tracks student performance and the payments to schools in Les Cayes, and in 2026 he was added to our board of directors.
Born in Les Cayes, he has been the program’s area coordinator there since 2017. From 2017 to 2020 the program supported 70 students; today it supports 25, more than half of them orphans.
He also helps lead PositiveRipples.org, and for a decade has overseen its water-well programs, which now bring clean water to around 3,000 people.
Put a student in school
$30 is one more month a child stays learning.
Your gift pays tuition straight to the school. It is tax-deductible, and it is the difference between a student in class and a student sent home.