AICB was formed in response to the devastating earthquake of 2010. The Twining family started an effort to put food in 5 gallon buckets to distribute in Haiti using extended family, friends and volunteers. In all, close to 20,000 buckets were filled with over 350,000 meals. When buckets weren’t going to Haiti, they were given to other people in need.  This included victims of tornadoes in Alabama, flood victims in Pakistan, and victims of the oil well explosion’s off of Louisiana. Other relief efforts were organized for Mexico City earthquake victims as well as substantial relief to the victims of the Fukushima reactor disaster in Japan. These activities cemented hearts of relief volunteerism in the hearts of the Twining’s.

In 2013 the Twining’s formed Urban Coop Company™, manufacturing backyard chicken coops on their property in Dripping Springs, TX. Almost immediately, thoughts of teaching Haitian children to care for small flocks of chickens so they could have eggs was envisioned.

Food for the chickens would be an issue, so Montie began designing a black soldier fly composting system that solved the issues that his wife Dyan had discovered in other commercially available products. The now patented GrubeCone™ was born. Many people contributed to a first trip and a group of students anchored by daughters Cassandra & Olivia was formed to go and build the systems at a school in Canaan. Even a solar panel and incubation system was built to grow the flock in Haiti. Over the next years, many eggs were laid and eaten, but other, better ideas got incubated on this trip that would change the mission.

It was in the early part of 2018 that the organization had the vision of supporting schools in Canaan. Canaan is the resettlement community for those people that were displaced by the 2010 earthquake.  It exists on the side of a mountain about an hour outside of Port au Prince. The first school that was to be adopted was in Canaan… district 3.

After only 5 years from the earthquake, there were over 250,000 people living in Canaan and 10’s of thousands of unschooled children. To this day, there is no electricity, no sewer and no water. By our way of seeing it, they are camping out in corrugated metal and cinder block shanty’s. K12 Canaan became the new corporate name and it wanted to lead “projects” to help kids in schools.

The first project of the freshly formed K12 Canaan was The Ekolaj Project.  Ekolaj mean “tuition” in Kreyol… the native language in Haiti. The vision was to build a site and promote sponsorship of the tuition for students.  Individual student pictures were taken and posted on a website that allowed a donor to come sponsor as little as a month or up to a whole year of a students tuition.

In our first school, Destiny Canaan 3, we received donations that allowed monthly tuition to be paid for 100+ students. In our second year, we ended up adding a second school in Mole ST Nicolas and started helping the 60 or so students there as well. Pretty quickly we learned that it was difficult to actually earmark money on a student by student basis, and some students get sponsored, and some don’t… not always on a fair basis. The vision had equability concerns but the financial benefits to the schools, the students and the parents became obvious.

Haiti Joe Coffee Warehouse

During a trip in early 2020 right before COVID hit, the Twining’s met executives at Rebo Coffee in Port au Prince and shared the vision of using coffee as cause product to raise money for schools. Not only did the good people at Rebo almost instantly agree to help, they have taken an integral role in helping leadership of K12 Haiti solve some of the cultural challenges of helping in Haiti.

A carefully crafted roast called Haitian Roast was developed and will be launched at Haiti Joes website in the 4th quarter of 2021. The coffee will be sold direct to consumer in a unique model that will clearly disclose the “cost” of the landed coffee in the USA and allow a buyer to add a donation of their choice on top of the “cost”. 100% of the donated monies will go to serve the schools of K12 Haiti even allowing the purchaser to choose a school for their donation.

Pretty quickly, money for the school in Mole ST Nicolas started being sent and was earmarked for the payment of teachers. We learned that if the teachers could be reliably paid… they came to work.  With the elimination of the schools single biggest expense, administrators were able to juggle tuition fees as family’s cash flow allowed. They were able to offer more frequent snacks, and better access to water. A schools reputation improved because the quality of teachers it could attract with reliable good pay was impacted.

During the time of Ekolaj, we were constantly being asked for money for technology projects and textbooks too.  It became obvious that we could do more. Several years back, the name K12 Haiti was reserved for future use in case K12 Canaan failed to contain the vision of the organization. Already, we had branched out to Mole ST Nicolas… who would say “no” to students, just because you didn’t live in Canaan.

So to contain the enormous excitement for the possibilities of Haiti Joe coffee becoming a significant resource for funding, and the increased vision of more of Haiti outside of Canaan, the organization was renamed K12 Haiti. Teachers, Textbooks & Technology would guide its vision along with its continued support of “special projects” for schools as donors and leaders allowed. For instance, several optometrists have shown interest in taking on providing students badly needed glasses.  Someone may wish to do water projects, or other service projects.  It’s our wish to focus on the Teachers, textbook & technology message but still leave open a framework to do more.