I came back to Haiti because the land called me back. Not metaphorically. I mean that I arrived in Cap Rouge in a season of personal unraveling, and the mountains held me in a way that nothing else had. I stayed. I started paying attention. And what I saw in the soil, the erosion, the loss, the slow forgetting of what once grew here, mirrored something I recognized from the inside.

That is where Grown in Haiti was born. Not from a plan. From a reckoning.

Since 2014, I have been working alongside farming families in the mountains of southern Haiti to rebuild what extraction and neglect have undone. We grow native trees. We save seeds. We restore degraded land using agroforestry systems that work with nature's intelligence rather than against it. We have built water infrastructure, cultivated a nursery, and grown the AgriNatif network, a community of stewards who do not wait for outside solutions because they know the answers are already here, in the soil, in the seed, in the knowledge that survived everything.

I do not use the word beneficiary. The families we work with are not recipients of someone else's vision. They are the vision. They carry generations of ecological knowledge that formal systems have spent decades trying to replace. My job is to support what they already know, resource what they are already doing, and make sure the world can see what is actually possible when communities lead their own land back to life.

This work has taken me beyond Cap Rouge as well. In 2025 I was selected as a Finalist at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin, one of the world’s most recognized forums for scientific and social breakthrough, where I presented Grown in Haiti’s regenerative model to an international audience of scientists, policymakers, and global leaders. I also serve as Vice President on the board of the Caribbean Ecology Institute, where I bring the perspective of on-the-ground regenerative practice to the broader regional conversation about land, ecology, and community resilience. And I teach a free course on syntropic farming on the Earthed platform, making the knowledge we develop on the ground in Cap Rouge accessible to anyone, anywhere.

I do this work as a father. As someone born in Haiti, shaped in America, and returned to the place that made me. As someone who believes that regeneration is not a program or a project. It is a way of being in relationship with the living world.

The mountains are not a backdrop to this work. They are the reason for it.

And every tree planted is a sentence in a longer story about what it means to care for something enough to stay.