In accordance with President Sidney Ribeau’s call for the Howard community to channel its deep feeling of kinship with Haiti into assistance, three Spring 2010 University-Wide Learning Communities will be devoted to educating the campus and broader community about the circumstances, causes and solutions to the challenges Haiti faces.

Each learning community will bring together faculty, students and area experts to consider the major questions raised by the current crisis in Haiti, in the following broad thematic categories:

• global warming, climate change and the environment
• public health and access to health care
• global population movements and their effect on individuals and societies
• race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity
• domestic policy effects on social, economic and/or cultural sub-groups among the citizenry

Each learning community will include three panels of faculty, students and area experts deliberately selected from the full range of academic disciplines in order to spur interdisciplinary exchanges and problem-solving discourse. The three Learning Communities will address the following topics:

• Learning Community One (February 16, 2010): What happened in Haiti?
This learning community will focus on studying the immediate events leading up to and comprising the current crisis in Haiti. What were the causes and consequences of this natural disaster? What is the scope and magnitude of the crisis in material, human, cultural and socio-economic terms? How can we study these causes and consequences across the academic disciplines?
• Learning Community Two (March 9, 2010): What made Haiti vulnerable?
This learning community will focus on the long-range background and implications of the contemporary crisis, including an emphasis on the historical, social policy, artistic, demographic and technical roots that led to the current state of affairs in Haiti. What can we learn from the history of Haiti that will reveal patterns of systemic inequality that can then be addressed and not repeated?
• Learning Community Three (April 13, 2010): How do we plan for the future in Haiti?
This learning community will focus on the rebuilding, reconstruction and prevention dimensions of the Haitian crisis. Given the lessons learned from the interdisciplinary study of the background, immediate causes and short and long-term consequences of this contemporary disaster, how can students and scholars from across the academic fields provide models for renewing Haiti using the best intellectual work and practice?