Haitian staples and delicacies collected by the At Risk Children Foundation and Save the Kids. Buy the digital edition, or give $40 or more and we will post you a printed copy — either way the funds go straight to the Launchpad.
Gifts are made directly to the At Risk Children Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3), which receives the funds and issues your receipt.
Figures are drawn from the TKBF project proposal, The Chez Moi Digital Launchpad, for the term beginning 3 October 2026.
The At Risk Children Foundation has housed, fed and schooled Haitian children since 2002. It now cares for 139 children. Housing, meals and school fees are provided until the young person reaches the age at which the Foundation can no longer support them — and then that support ends.
What happens in the eighteen months either side of that date determines the next thirty years. At present a young person leaving ARCF care carries a secondary education into a labour market where employers demand credentials Haitian schools do not issue, and where the informal economy is the default destination.
Three things stand between them and a different outcome, and all three are purchasable: a credential an employer outside Haiti will recognise, professional English — these young people already speak French and Haitian Creole — and a route to an actual employer. That is what your gift buys.
“By investing in the education and development of these impoverished children, we not only prevent them from being marginalized and becoming victims of exploitation, but also free them to succeed, break the chain of poverty, and change the future for their families, their children and beyond.”
At Risk Children Foundation — Save the Kids’ Computer Lab ProjectThe curriculum is built on freeCodeCamp, a non-profit whose full curriculum and verified certifications are free of charge. The certificates are recognised by employers internationally and the marginal cost of adding a student is zero — so every dollar in this budget buys facility, hardware, instruction and student support, not licence fees.
Windows environment, file management, typing, the Office suite, internet and email, basic troubleshooting. No prior experience assumed, no one turned away for lacking it.
Workplace English, technical vocabulary, 105 recorded dialogues, listening, reading and writing. B1 for students who advance past A2.
HTML, CSS, forms, accessibility, flexbox, grid, typography, CSS variables, transforms and animation. Fifteen practice projects and five certification projects.
Version control and GitHub, portfolio construction, professional profiles, technical interviewing, freelance and remote contracting, and professional written French.
A program that depends permanently on visiting foreign instructors is not a program; it is a series of visits. TKBF instructors deploy in three rotations of two instructors for 21 days — at months 1–2, 5–6 and 10–11 — to commission the lab, teach the first cohort, then hand instruction to two Haitian trainee instructors and a lab coordinator, certified to run the full curriculum without expatriate supervision before the final rotation withdraws.
Those three local roles are volunteer positions in year one. Converting them to paid Haitian posts, at $20,400 a year, is the first call on year-two grant funding. We do not present unpaid local labour as a permanent model.
This project is run with the At Risk Children Foundation (ARCF), based in Port-au-Prince–Custine, Haiti, which supports orphaned and vulnerable children through school. ARCF already carries an annual school budget of $47,500 covering tuition, textbooks, uniforms and footwear for the children in its care.
That budget is fully committed to keeping children in school. It contains no capacity to fund technical training of any kind. The Launchpad is how the technical training gets funded — without taking a dollar out of the classroom.
Enrolment is prioritised by urgency. Tier 1 is ARCF youth aged 16–24 nearing programme exit and alumni who have aged out within the last 36 months; no lower-tier participant is enrolled into a session block a Tier 1 applicant could fill.
ARCF co-founders: Marlene Mathurin and Kristine Lafleur. Implementing partner for the Launchpad: Marlene Mathurin.
Chez Moi is a residence in Port-au-Prince with real, usable infrastructure already in place: walls, secured rooms, sanitation, electrical service, a working generator, an existing internet connection, and a location young people can safely reach.
The generator and the internet line alone remove $9,500 from what a comparable project would have to raise in its first year. Converting a building that already exists is faster and cheaper than constructing one — and because TKBF leases the site, twenty laptops relocate to Custine in a single vehicle when that lab opens.
Fund the LaunchpadEach student station: 14″ business-class laptop, Core i5 (12th gen or later), 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe, Wi-Fi 6 and gigabit ethernet, French Canadian or AZERTY keyboard — $625 per unit, specified to survive heat and dust.
We are small enough that every contribution maps to a real object a real student sits down at. These are the actual project costs from the year-one budget, not round numbers.
Where your payment goes: these buttons open the At Risk Children Foundation’s own PayPal donation page — the same one linked from savethekids.com — which accepts PayPal, Venmo, or any debit or credit card. ARCF is a registered 501(c)(3); they receive your gift, issue your receipt, and run the program on the ground in Haiti.
A full student workstation to project specification — machine, software, network and headset. One more seat in the lab, named for you, and it relocates to Custine when that lab opens.
The facility and program commitment is $5,500 a month — the lease at Chez Moi together with agreed ARCF program support. One hundred people at $55 covers it. This is the most useful gift we receive.
PayPal opens on One-Time — tap Monthly at the top, then enter $55.
A named young person carried through a full certification pathway — reported back to you with their certificates and the portfolio they built, start to finish.
Every capital and shipping cost in one gift — twenty laptop stations, networking, inverter and battery bank, furniture, security hardware, freight and customs. Largely one-time costs that never recur.
Other ways to give. Underwrite the $20,400 that places all three Haitian local roles on salary ahead of year-two grants. Or give $40 or more and we will send you the ARCF cookbook as thanks.
We also accept checks, donor-advised fund grants, employer matching, and in-kind donations of laptops, networking equipment and freight capacity — each of which converts directly into additional stations. Email rob@theknowledgebankfoundation.org and a human will reply.
Quebec has moved decisively toward French as a condition of skilled worker selection. For most international applicants that is a formidable barrier. For a graduate of an ARCF residence in Port-au-Prince, French is a first language of education.
What these graduates lack is not French but a technical credential and professional English. This curriculum was chosen precisely to supply both. A graduate holding a Responsive Web Design certificate, a portfolio of twenty built projects, an A2 or B1 English for Developers certificate and native-standard French is a credible candidate for a junior front-end role in Montreal in a way a secondary transcript alone never is.
We do not promise immigration outcomes. Quebec policy is in active revision and requirements can change between a student’s enrolment and their graduation. We say that plainly to every participant. Remote contract placement is developed as a parallel route, and the credential holds independent value in the Haitian and remote markets for students who do not or cannot emigrate.
We report to donors quarterly and publish a full year-one evaluation — including targets missed and the reasons for the shortfall.
The Launchpad does not replace, compete with or fundraise against ARCF’s computer lab at Custine. It is the first stage of it. Custine will give every ARCF student the computer literacy the Haitian National Education Ministry’s revamped curriculum now requires — the prerequisite our advanced tracks are built on top of. Chez Moi is where the program starts; Custine is where it scales.
The four figures below belong to ARCF’s computer lab project, not to the Chez Moi Digital Launchpad. They are shown here because the two projects are designed to be read and funded together.
ARCF’s three donated desktops sit in Custine, in a building that is not yet finished. Completing that lab means 37 more machines, networking for all 40, furniture, a smartboard and a 3,000-watt solar system — and it is years away from serving a student at current funding.
The young people living in Port-au-Prince cannot reach those three machines on any regular schedule, and they are turning eighteen now. That is why the Launchpad exists and why it is in a different city.
Every capital item bought for Chez Moi — laptops, inverter and battery bank, networking, furniture, security hardware — relocates to Custine when that facility opens. Nothing purchased here is stranded by the move.
C’est Si Bon! Haïtien Cuisine Cookbook is a collection of Haitian staples and delicacies put together by the At Risk Children Foundation and Save the Kids. It is a book meant to be passed around — left in a break room, handed to a neighbour, mailed to a niece at college — and every copy carries the story of the children it supports.
Donate $40 or more through the ARCF PayPal page and a copy is yours. Prefer to read it tonight? Buy the digital edition for $19.99. Either way the funds go directly to the Chez Moi Digital Launchpad.
After a gift of $40 or more, email your mailing address to rob@theknowledgebankfoundation.org and we will put a copy in the post.
The Knowledge Bank Foundation is awaiting its 501(c)(3) determination. Until it is granted, donations to this program are made directly to the At Risk Children Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) — ARCF receives the funds, issues your receipt, and disburses them to the program. Please consult your tax advisor about deductibility.
No student has ever paid us for a seat, and none ever will. The freeCodeCamp curriculum and its certifications are free and remain free — nothing here carries a per-student licence cost that grows as enrolment grows.
We will send the full Chez Moi Digital Launchpad proposal, the ARCF computer lab proposal, a breakdown of where the monthly $5,500 goes, or an honest answer about what is not working yet. Write to rob@theknowledgebankfoundation.org.