Rollins student brings sustainable shoes to Haiti

A plane landed on torn and shaken terrain. The sound of dogs wailing filled the night air, as Haitians covered in dust, blood and face masks attempted to find unity in the chaos. Songs of praise in Creole juxtaposed the horror of the aftermath of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that ravaged Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010.

Julie Colombino walked off the plane to the wreckage with sturdy shoes on her feet while many Haitians lost all their belongings in the earthquake. Barefoot, middle-aged local women approached her to ask for jobs. Haitians stacked tires three or four high and threw their trash inside to burn, as that was the best waste management system.

That improvisation sparked an idea in the disaster relief worker’s mind — an idea to effectively end world poverty.

“What we’re looking at is generational change, having people understand the power and possibility of development when a Haitian person makes something of value from materials found in their own country, versus a foreign person giving something used and old to a person in poverty,” said the 36-year-old Orlando resident.

Colombino’s nonprofit was launched on Aug. 14, 2010 when she and three Haitian women sat on the floor of a tarped tent as they cut tires with razor blades, creating an industrious way to cover their feet with only Google how-to videos to guide them.

“I felt called to Haiti. I’m a woman of faith, and I felt strongly called to be there,” Colombino said. “I just remember God saying, ‘Listen more than you talk. Just listen.’”

What she heard was a desperate need for shoes. But soon Colombino realized incorporating as a business would be necessary to sustain the then-nonprofit company’s impact. So on Jan. 1, 2014, Colombino and her crew founded Deux Mains Designs, an employee-owned and operated footwear company in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to do just that. A team of 23 Haitians have been trained to become sandal craftsmen and women who make sandals out of recycled Haitian materials with their “deux mains,” or “two hands,” while being paid and receiving employee benefits.

With the for-profit and its Haitian employees being 100 percent dependent on the sales of Deux Mains, Colombino said her team deserved a leader who has more knowledge on how to successfully run a booming business. She decided to go back to school and applied for the Rollins College Martin Bell Scholarship in the hopes of furthering her education and to grow her business skills.

After a selective application process, Colombino was awarded the scholarship in April 2016, which fully funds the 18-month Crummer MBA program.

“[Colombino] gets it because she has lived it, but she also is humble enough to realize there’s more to learn,” said Jacqueline Brito, the Assistant Dean of Crummer. “She wants to utilize this education experience to even further grow her business to be able to create more opportunities for people in REBUILD globally.”

The nonprofit REBUILD globally encourages the philosophy that teaching a man to fish is more valuable than giving him a fish. Over the last six years, more than 9,000 tires from Haiti have been recycled into approximately 15,000 sandals that are sold to missionaries who then give the hand-crafted shoes to children in Haitian orphanages and schools. Colombino said even though the MBA program just commenced in August, she already feels a shift in her mindset, as she’s focusing on forecasting her business. With half of each week spent in Haiti doing hands-on design and training sessions and the other half at Rollins, her schedule is spread thin. But her passion is persevering.

“It’s going to be very difficult, but anything that’s worth doing is difficult,” she said.

This is just the beginning for Colombino and her team. The ultimate goal is to become the largest ethical fashion company in the world by applying the same business model in places suffering from refugee crises and poverty, such as Syria and Greece.

“We will be all over the world fighting poverty with dignity through job creation and training,” Colombino said. “And that’s from a global perspective. From a consumer standpoint, we will be teaching the world that the products they buy can impact in such a way that we can save our own planet, and we can save our communities.”

She hasn’t forgotten about applying these economic benefits to the City Beautiful though. Colombino is also going to focus her efforts locally by aiming to become the sole distributor of Major League Soccer sandals as she paints the town purple with Orlando City Soccer sandals, ideally to be sold by residents in Parramore and Central Florida.

“[Colombino] is going to help lead her team, provide support for them and she’s going to continue to add value in our community,” Brito said.