In South Seattle neighborhoods like the Central District, Rainier Beach, Beacon Hill, South Park, and Georgetown, residents live with daily climate burdens: poor air quality, recurring flooding, mold in homes, extreme heat, and the stress that comes from being overlooked in planning processes. These challenges are lived realities for families, small businesses, and entire communities.
Mapping Our Place, Telling Our Story is Kay Tita’s response. Building on years of work with the Digital Sales Access Program (DSAP), which has served over 500 small businesses across Seattle and Tacoma, this new initiative expands from digital literacy to spatial literacy. Our goal is simple but powerful: give residents the tools to map their own climate stories.
Through hands-on workshops, residents learn participatory mapping and GIS skills to document environmental hazards in their neighborhoods. Community listening sessions and storytelling circles create space for lived experiences to be shared and honored. A public, multilingual digital dashboard brings these voices and data together, visualizing patterns of heat, pollution, flooding, and housing conditions.
Mapping Our Place, Telling Our Story is inspired by global examples: Indigenous women in Odisha, India, creating “dream maps” to reclaim their land, and youth in Detroit using GIS to expose environmental harms in their communities. We are adapting these lessons to Seattle, ensuring that the people most affected by climate injustice lead the process of making the invisible visible.
For Kay Tita, this work continues the mission we began after the 2010 Haiti earthquake: advancing resilience, dignity, and equity in the face of systemic neglect. Whether in Port-au-Prince or South Seattle, our approach empowers people to tell their stories, map their realities, and shape the future of their communities.
Impact Hub Port-Au-Prince takes an authentic approach to developing community, inspiring members through sustainable practices. Emphasizing progressive inclusivity and transparency, Impact Hub aims to preserve and expand Port-Au-Prince’s creative and thriving entrepreneurial culture. We hope to reach maximum effectiveness with the intentional practice of accountability. Guided by love, respect, honor, and trust, we always seek to refine, elevate, and restore the health of our community.
will direct a training and operations program within Impact Hub called GeoHaiti. GeoHaiti trains adults on geospatial information systems (GIS) that serve to improve community disaster resilience. Training topics include community communications, water and sanitation management, environmental preservation, public health measures, community disease surveillance, sustainable infrastructure, and hazard analysis.
Kay Tita will be the greenest commercial building in Haiti since it will be constructed according to The Living Building Challenge (LBC) standards, considered the most rigorous environmental performance standard. People from around the world use this regenerative design framework to create spaces that produce more energy than they utilize.
MUCE EDUCATES is an organization co-founded by Barthelemy Mervil, David Pierre-Louis’ brother, and utilizes arts promote intercultural exchange and to bring an end to cyclical poverty. MUCE is committed to teaching the visual arts to youth in urban areas so that they may compete in the global market. The organization provides educational workshops and opportunities for the emerging labor force with an emphasis on production in arts and culture.
Haiti Coffee Co. is a U.S. based company that imports Haitian Coffee while working towards infrastructure development that directly benefits the farmers from whom they source. The organization provides solutions that address deforestation, environmental sustainability, agriculture training, and infrastructure development.
Seattle‐based startup, Impact Bioenergy, manufactures and sells bioenergy systems that convert organic waste materials into renewable natural gas and fertilizer with zero waste.
Ambient Water (formerly AWG International) is Washington state based company that uses a patented technology that transforms humidity into an abundant source of safe, clean water.
Startup Week brings entrepreneurs, local leaders, and friends together over five days to build momentum for their vision for change.
The DoSchool develops experiential learning programs centered around innovation and facilitates opportunities for entrepreneurs to move from ideation to implementation.
Yes Baby I Like it Raw helps people tap into their raw potential and “process the unprocessed life” by developing health and wellness programming such as yoga meditation, and nutrition.
Days for Girls puts freedom and opportunity back into the hands of women and girls by providing sustainable hygiene solutions.
