In Southeast Queens in the 1970s and 1980s, Sacred Heart Church was the Friday night hangout for teens in the Haitian Creole-speaking community. Marco Solomon, Katia Celifie-Aime, Phillipe P. Titus and many of their peers got their first paid jobs there as camp counselors through a grant that employed young people in the community. Elders also taught them about politics abroad, civic responsibility and self-empowerment.
At the time, Haitians were leaving their homeland in large numbers amid political, social and economic turmoil under the Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier dictatorship. Neighbors in Queens Village, Cambria Heights and St. Albans eventually channeled that civic engagement into Haitian Americans United for Progress (HAUP), which helped newcomers with housing, health education and employment.
More than 50 years later and just down the block from HAUP headquarters, Solomon and his old friends from their Sacred Heart days are taking social services directly to the community with their own nonprofit. In 2022, they founded Frè Ak Sè, which means “Brothers and Sisters” in Haitian Creole. Focused on youth and older adults, economic development and mental health, the nonprofit offers workshops and programming that meet the needs of Haitians in Southeast Queens.
Solomon describes Frè Ak Sè’s approach as “konbit,” a Haitian Creole term for mutual aid. “It’s like a place where people can come to get advice and get to know each other and get to know how we can still obtain certain services,” he said, “because this thing going on right now impacts all of us.”
The founding team sees the community facing similar needs as during the peak of their teen years but in some ways, it’s tougher to serve them. “Right now the community is scared to death — people are not coming out,” said Solomon, president of Frè Ak Sè. He cited the Trump administration’s immigration policies and its recent termination of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haitians. More than 5,400 Haitians in New York City alone have been left vulnerable to deportation by the move. To make things worse, violence and instability have deepened in Haiti even as the government is pushing to return immigrants there.
“So we’re caught in [between] a rock and a hard place,” Solomon said. “We’re being persecuted here and yet we can’t go back home.”
Frè Ak Sè’s first event was a health fair. They recruited nurses, mental health providers and other health care professionals to volunteer to take blood pressures and discuss various health topics. For Celifie-Aime, who also runs the Queens/Long Island chapter of Black Girls Do Bike, the health-wealth connection is real.
“When we come into this country, our diet is different, and then finding our food isn’t as fresh, so people are gaining weight and developing metabolic disease,” Celifie-Aime said, adding that not having health insurance adds another access barrier for many.
In part because of that culture-health barrier, much of Frè Ak Sè’s community-building work happens through food-centered events.
“Culture is the glue that keeps us together,” Celifie-Aime said.
A year ago, Frè Ak Sè moved into its headquarters on Hollis Avenue to more directly serve the community. The team starts with an intake survey in this space or at events, then connects neighbors with resources or partners that specialize in certain services, including HAUP for immigration legal aid.
On a Friday in August, they were hunkered down in the Queens Village hub planning for a pop-up thrift event to raise money for programming. Celifie-Aime stopped poring over paperwork long enough to show an impromptu slideshow of a chicken farm in Haiti that the nonprofit is is helping to build to support a village’s self-sufficiency. For the team, maintaining “konbit” with Haitians in the homeland is just as important as doing so with their Queens neighbors.
To run these services and make referrals, the nonprofit draws on its cofounders’ decades of experience in social work, finance, entrepreneurship, health education and navigating stacks of paperwork. That includes Titus, who said he grew into his role as Frè Ak Sè’s treasurer — handling state registrations and filings and creating a for-profit arm of the organization — after working as a “regular” limo driver. Their community relationships also extend their reach, including partnerships with Selah Driving School for driving lessons and Taurus Financial for an upcoming financial literacy program in local schools.
The group has hosted food pantry events in its headquarters, with the next set for September.
“After paying the rent, which takes more than 50% of their salary, how do you go about feeding yourself?” Solomon said.
The financial literacy sessions the group regularly offers have shown them how Haiti’s decades of turmoil have affected practices around money. “Our parents didn’t teach us certain things about finances,” Celifie-Aime said, citing the still pervasive fear among Haitians around risks such as investing and buying property.
Now, new fears of deportation and the isolation of staying home are compounding existing housing, food and mental health needs, said Solomon, a retired social worker.
“There’s definitely a desperate need for what we do here,” he said. “Because you can’t do this by yourself.”
For those affected by the end of TPS, the change has added new worries: What happens to U.S.-born children if their parents are deported? What happens to the house, bank account and belongings of people forced out of the country?
And the political situation isn’t just tough on neighbors with a particular immigration status. Under the Trump administration, immigration enforcement has increasingly affected organizations that serve migrants, issuing subpoenas, opening investigations and making visits to legal-service providers’ offices to request records, all of which advocates have called intimidation tactics.
“Nonetheless, we need to do this job,” Solomon said. “Somebody has to do it. We need to do it.”
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Learn more about supporting a sustainable poultry farm in Haiti.
