Ask a Haitian about what life was like growing up, and chances are they’ll tell you about a place.
Maybe it was the lakou — the common yard adjoining homes — where neighbors and cousins gathered after school. Maybe it was the church courtyard where members lingered long after Sunday service had ended. Maybe it was the beach where families and friends spent their weekend afternoons, or a market or town square where everyone knew one another.
These informal places rarely appear on maps or development plans, but they help inform the structure of society as much as roads, schools, or hospitals.
Most of us spend the majority of our lives moving between a few familiar places: home, school or work, and somewhere in-between.
In 1989, urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg described these community gathering places as “third places,” what many people today refer to as third spaces. They are the places where relationships are built outside of family and work. They are open and accessible, welcoming to people from different walks of life, and centered around something surprisingly simple: spending time together.
Around the world, third spaces might look like neighborhood cafés, libraries, parks, barber shops, recreation centers, or community gardens.
Haiti has long had its own versions.
Long before the term was formally included in academic conversations, communities gathered in lakou, church grounds, public squares, markets, beaches, neighborhood streets, and roadside intersections. Motorcycle taxi drivers waited for their regular passengers at the karfou, street corner. Machann, vendors, returned to the same small section of the market each morning, building relationships with customers and neighboring vendors year after year. Children played soccer barefoot in open fields until sunset while adults caught up nearby, and men gathered in barber shops, both for grooming services and as a way to watch the Brazil or Argentina soccer game over a couple of Prestige amongst friends.
These places offered something easy to overlook but difficult to replace. They fostered trust, strengthened identity, created a sense of belonging, and reminded people that they were part of something larger than themselves.
If third spaces help hold communities together, what happens when they disappear?
Across Haiti, that question is no longer theoretical.
Years of escalating violence have fundamentally changed how people move through and gather within their communities. Places that once welcomed conversation, celebration, and everyday routines have, in many cases, become places people avoid.
But perhaps the greatest loss isn’t the physical space itself. It’s the community that existed because of it.
More than one million Haitians have now been displaced by violence, the largest displacement crisis in the country’s recent history. Entire neighborhoods have emptied as families have fled shootings, kidnappings, and the growing control of armed groups. Many are now rebuilding their lives in unfamiliar communities, separated from the networks of neighbors, relatives, church members, teachers, and local business owners who once formed the rhythm of daily life.
For generations, many Haitians have lived in the same neighborhoods, attended the same churches, shopped from the same machann, greeted the same motorcycle taxi drivers at the karfou, and watched children grow up together.
Displacement interrupts far more than a person’s physical address.
It dismantles the informal support systems that help communities function — the neighbor who noticed when a child didn’t come home after school; the church member who checked in on an elderly widow; the vendor who extended credit to a struggling family; the teacher who knew every student by name.
Those relationships cannot simply be recreated overnight.
Following Haiti’s qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, several Haitian media outlets reflected on something unexpected. Alongside the excitement of returning to the world’s biggest stage was a sense of grief over the loss of the family-friendly public spaces where previous generations would have gathered to celebrate together. Journalists described the rapid disappearance of these communal gathering places as another consequence of Haiti’s ongoing insecurity and social fragmentation.
Between July 2024 and February 2025, more than 4,200 people were killed and over 1,300 injured, with 92 percent of casualties resulting from gun violence. Armed groups have occupied or destroyed schools, hospitals, courts, media outlets, and orphanages while using violence in public spaces to assert territorial control. As insecurity has spread beyond Port-au-Prince into regions like the Artibonite, communities that were once considered relatively stable have also experienced displacement, burned homes, and the loss of everyday gathering places.
When parks, church courtyards, markets, and neighborhood streets become associated with shootings, kidnappings, or sexual violence, people stop using them.
Children no longer play there. Families no longer linger after church. Neighbors shorten conversations. Daily routines become defined not by connection, but by caution.
Over time, these small changes reshape the social fabric of a community.
While today’s insecurity has dramatically accelerated the loss of third spaces, Haiti’s shortage of public gathering places did not begin with gang violence.
For decades, rapid urban growth, limited infrastructure, and underinvestment in public spaces have left many communities without parks, recreation areas, or civic gathering places. As urban neighborhoods rapidly expanded, especially following the 2010 earthquake, homes often appeared long before the public infrastructure that helps communities thrive.
UN-Habitat notes that well-functioning cities devote roughly half of their surface area to public space — streets, parks, plazas, sidewalks, markets, and other places where people gather. While few cities reach that benchmark, Haiti’s public space deficit is particularly pronounced, especially in densely populated urban neighborhoods where safe communal areas are often scarce.
The result is that many communities have had to create their own third spaces wherever they could. A church courtyard becomes a playground after school. A street corner becomes a meeting place. A marketplace becomes the center of neighborhood life. A beach becomes a place where families reconnect after a long week.
These spaces matter precisely because there are so few alternatives.
Fortunately, experience from across Haiti suggests that relatively small investments in public space can have an outsized impact.
When Place de la Paix was rehabilitated, improvements such as lighting, drainage, greenery, sports facilities, restrooms, and repaired playground equipment transformed the area into a safer, more welcoming place for people of all ages.
Along Haiti’s southern coast, improvements to Plage de la Touterelle — including seating, lighting, erosion control, and kiosks — helped turn the waterfront into one of the area’s most popular gathering places for young people.
In Canaan, where more than 200,000 people settled after the 2010 earthquake with little formal infrastructure, community members worked alongside planners to redesign the Bon Repos transportation hub. The addition of shade, benches, green space, and better organization improved daily life for vendors, drivers, and residents alike.
None of these projects solved Haiti’s broader challenges. But they did something equally important. They made it easier for people to encounter one another again and strengthened the social infrastructure that every healthy community depends on.
Children need safe spaces to thrive.
They need places where they can safely play, develop friendships, discover mentors, and become known by the adults around them. They need communities where parents feel connected, neighbors look out for one another, and trusted relationships can grow over time.
At Restavek Freedom, we see this every day. Leadership clubs, summer camps, literacy classes, and community meetings all depend on spaces where people can gather safely. While programs may begin with a curriculum or an activity, their lasting impact often comes from something less tangible: the relationships that are formed there.
Investing in third spaces is ultimately an investment in people. It creates opportunities for connection, belonging, and mutual care, the very things that help communities become more resilient in the face of adversity.
Help create more spaces where children can learn, grow, and belong by giving here.