HAITI / CRAFT / INSPIRATION
Julie
Colombino-Billingham
The answer
was a job.
By Rob Urban
The answer Julie Colombino-Billingham received in Haiti did not fit the task she had arrived to do. Following the 2010 earthquake, she was helping with disaster relief. A woman told her that what she needed was work.
Julie has returned to that exchange in accounts of how REBUILD globally and Deux Mains began. It redirected her attention from an immediate distribution problem toward a much longer commitment. The person in front of her had identified a need that would continue after the emergency supplies were gone.
The Deux Mains account connects that encounter with the development of a business producing leather goods in Haiti. Its founder and creative director has ties to Orlando, while the making, training, and daily work of the enterprise are rooted in Haitian communities. The skills and decisions of the Haitian team belong at the center of the story.
It is also a story about taking an answer seriously enough to change your own plan. Listening sounds gentle until it requires you to learn an industry you know almost nothing about.
The first customers
were nearby.
In a 2025 interview, Colombino-Billingham described arriving without a background in fashion design or manufacturing. She and Haitian artisans began making sandals from repurposed tires. Relief workers, United Nations staff, and visitors became early customers.
One of those early collaborators was Jolina Auguste. Rob Humphreys’s 2018 Rollins profile describes Auguste caring for children orphaned by the earthquake and asking how she could keep feeding them without an income. Colombino-Billingham remembered tire sandals made in Malawi. Auguste knew how to sew and had worked in a factory. They began experimenting together.
I admire the willingness to let that practical knowledge shape the answer. A person can understand an urgent need and still need a partner who knows what to do with the material. Auguste brought capability and a reason to persist. Naming her helps us see the beginning more clearly: two people trying to make an idea useful.
That is a more instructive beginning than a sudden jump from earthquake relief to international retail. The product had to become something someone would buy. Materials had to be worked into a useful object. Customers had to be found close enough to the fledgling enterprise for a transaction to happen.
In that 2025 interview, she also described obstacles that continued as the business developed: disrupted shipments, broken machinery, fuel shortages, and times when unrest made travel to work unsafe. Those are operational problems with consequences for actual people. Keeping an enterprise running means revising plans around conditions that a founder cannot simply wish away.
I am interested in that part of the story because it resists the tidy arc of an inspirational business biography. An origin can be moving and the following Tuesday can still require solving a machine problem. The staying power lives in those Tuesdays.
Two
organizations.
Different
jobs.
REBUILD globally’s model connects a nonprofit with a commercial partner. The nonprofit provides education and workforce preparation. Deux Mains makes and sells goods, creating employment that trained participants can enter. They are related organizations with different responsibilities.
That arrangement addresses a familiar weakness in job-training projects: completing training does not itself create an employer. A certificate can be valuable and still leave its owner searching. Here, the business is part of the employment pathway rather than an organization everyone hopes will appear later.
It also gives the commercial side a clear obligation. Beautiful products and reliable sales have to support the jobs the model depends on. There is room for both a donor and a customer, but they are participating in different ways. Confusing the two would make it harder to understand how the work holds together.
Keep the student
moving forward.
The Elèv education program helps cover tuition, books, and uniforms, and provides tutoring and mentorship. Subjects include mathematics and sciences as well as French, the language used for national examinations. Its pathway can continue into workforce training and access to university scholarships.
Those details show why “access to education” needs more than paying one bill. A student needs the required materials and support to succeed once enrolled. The point is to help someone continue through a sequence, with fewer preventable interruptions along the way.
The stipend belongs
in the description.
REBUILD’s job-training program describes six months of preparation accompanied by a stipend. It includes work experience and a route into employment with the partner enterprise. The organization reports job placement for its graduates.
Paying participants during training is a substantial design choice. A person with immediate household expenses may be unable to accept an unpaid opportunity, however promising its eventual benefits. The stipend acknowledges that learning takes time and that time has a cost.
The program publishes Julia’s account of being able to buy soap rather than wait for someone to provide it. That is a small purchase with a large change in the relationship behind it. Earning money creates choices that a donated item cannot supply, including the choice of what is needed most urgently.
Colombino-Billingham’s work sits alongside another employment-centered story in this series, Kristin Keen’s Rethreaded in Jacksonville. The circumstances and organizations differ, but both take the workplace seriously as part of rebuilding a life. Employment involves schedules, skills, colleagues, and the ability to plan beyond today’s emergency.
Whose hands
are doing the work?
The people inside the system deserve names. REBUILD’s team includes education director Wilkens Tibert and tutors with expertise in subjects from chemistry to French. Lovely Joseph, a graduate of the education and training pathway, became a human-resources manager. Her experience joins formal study with knowledge of the programs from the participant’s side.
At the Deux Mains factory in Port-au-Prince, the company describes solar-powered production, health insurance, ongoing training, and a workforce in which women hold many roles, including leadership positions. It also produces for other brands and corporate partners. The workshop has become part of a wider market for leather goods.
The products still have to work as products. A handbag needs useful construction, careful finishing, and a design somebody wants to carry. Admiration for the enterprise may lead a person to look; craftsmanship gives them a reason to keep using what they bought. The maker deserves to be evaluated for that skill.
Made here.
Worn here.
One of the most satisfying connections comes through the school-shoe program. Shoes made in Haiti are provided to students who need footwear meeting school requirements. The purchase supports local making while removing a practical barrier to attendance. The production and the use happen within the same larger community.
The published notes for her February 2026 How to Change the World interview trace the distance from tire sandals to a brand selling through Nordstrom. That expansion gives the work a broader audience. The more interesting continuity is the attention to what employment can make possible.
A woman told a relief volunteer what she needed. Julie listened. The work that followed required artisans, teachers, customers, and years of learning. Its value is visible in what those people have been able to build together.
About Julie and the work
Who is Julie Colombino-Billingham?
Julie Colombino-Billingham is the founder of REBUILD globally and the founder and creative director of Deux Mains. Her work connects education and job training with Haitian craftsmanship and employment.
How do REBUILD globally and Deux Mains work together?
REBUILD globally is the nonprofit providing education and workforce preparation. Deux Mains is its commercial partner, making and selling goods in Haiti and providing an employment pathway for trained participants.
What does Deux Mains make?
Deux Mains makes leather handbags, accessories and footwear in Haiti. Its work includes school shoes made locally for Haitian students through its partnership with REBUILD globally.
Sources: Deux Mains and REBUILD globally’s story, factory, team and program pages, checked September 2026; Julie’s December 2025 VoyageLA interview; Rob Humphreys’s November 2018 Rollins profile; and the published notes for the February 2026 How to Change the World episode. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
For more of my writing, or a thoughtful conversation about the work you are building, meet Rob.