At this year’s Haiti Outreach Twin Cities Fall Leadership Lunch, Roge Michel, our Director of Community Development, shared one of the core ideas at the heart of our leadership curriculum: Enrollment. Though Roge was unable to travel to the States this year, he recorded this important message for our guests.
Roge was Haiti Outreach’s second employee hired in Haiti and is one of the architects of the curriculum we use to coach community and municipal leaders across the country. In this talk, he explains what it really means to enroll someone. A leader may have a clear vision, but no one can achieve it alone. Enrollment means sharing that vision and inviting others to take ownership of it, so the work continues even when an individual leader steps away. As Roge describes, agreement is not the same as enrollment. People who are truly enrolled carry the vision forward as their own.
Enrollment is one of six core concepts that give Haitian leaders a shared language for leading change. Here are the others:
From Reasons to Responsibility: Trading excuses and blame for ownership, asking “What can I do?”
Existence: Naming challenges and writing them down, because leaders can only solve what they acknowledge
Enrollment: Inspiring others to share and own the vision
Integrity: Keeping commitments and building reliable community systems
Relationships: Leading together so solutions are understood and sustained by everyone
Breakdowns, Not Problems: Reframing a “problem,” which in Haitian culture can imply something unsolvable, as a “breakdown” that can and should be fixed
