Activist seeks to aid Haitian orphans through art
VANCOUVER, BC—Just after last January's powerful earthquake devastated Haiti, a rapper DJ in Atlanta, Georgia, called up Vancouver artist and community activist Stephanie Forster.
"He says, 'I heard you're a lady that knows how to get things done. Can't you do anything for Haiti? You got to set something up,'" Forster recalls him saying. "He's like, 'I can tell you're a real Christian. You call this pastor in Tennessee. You can trust him.'"
In 2008, Forster had founded the Nehemiah Foundation as a way to generate funding for arts and cultural initiatives as a way to break down barriers between the poor and the rest of society.
"Last year, we had the most momentum in regards to actually finishing stuff that I had envisioned," she says. "As a young person, it's been amazing just to see how God moves when the season is right, when you're obedient."
Forster felt led to take up this latest challenge and soon got involved in various efforts to deliver aid to the Haitian people. One project was a partnership with a Tennessee-based charity to build Joshua's Village, an orphanage for disabled children outside Port-au-Prince that provides medical care, advocacy, education and life skills.
In May, the foundation held a major fundraiser for the project that brought together 60 local artists. And in July, Forster herself went to Haiti to, as she says, "meet the locals and find out who's legitimate" and also film a documentary on the tragedy.
With Joshua's Village nearing completion, Forster is now working on opening a Vancouver-based online art gallery that would generate an ongoing revenue stream for Haitian artists—so that they in turn could be freed up to come alongside the orphans.
"The orphanage is one component, but the community that surrounds it is another, because those people work there," she says. "And we need those people to . . . actually come in and work with the children on an ongoing basis."
Vancouver artist Ron Sombilon came up with the idea. The plan is for the gallery he owns to digitally scan images of the artwork and reproduce them for sale in various sizes. It would handle all the shipping, printing and framing, and disperse the profits. Sombilon has similar ongoing projects in support of finding cures for cancer and juvenile diabetes.
"We're definitely going to get other artists from around the world involved," he says. "It'll essentially be a global gallery online that has a purpose—and the purpose is to help people, raise funds, and unify communities through art."
Forster hopes to have the online store up and running by the end of November. But that depends on whether they can find the necessary corporate sponsorships. "We want the corporations to pay for these services, so that the charity doesn't have to," Sombilon says.
More than nine months after the quake, many Haitians remain in extremely dire straits, says Peter Blackaby, a leader with the Canadian National Baptist Convention, who took a ministry team to Haiti in late August.
"There's people still sleeping in tents outside their homes, because they're scared to go back in. Any park, any field, any plaza is now a tent city. You see people trying to open up a shop basically outside their tent on the street," he says. "It looks like the earthquake happened yesterday. The rubble's still lying in the streets in piles."
"It's a terrible situation. I've never seen anything like it. It took me a while to decompress afterwards," says Forster. "A couple of natural storms and some of those people are going to be gone."
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