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 First
Lady of Haiti Mildred Trouillot Aristide, a 1984 City College
alumna, received CUNY’s Humanitarian Leadership Award
at a luncheon in her honor in June in the Board of Trustees
Room. The award cited her “exemplary leadership and outstanding
advocacy on behalf of economically disadvantaged children
of Haiti and New York City.”
The First Lady, who had spoken earlier at a United Nations
conference on AIDS, said, “the fight against AIDS must,
both in theory and practice, be a fight against poverty. If
you live in poverty, you are likely to be poorly educated,
to be malnourished, to suffer gender inequality if you are
a woman, to have less access to basic medicines and health
care. And these are the conditions that facilitate the spread
of HIV/AIDS.” She cited in particular the urgent need
to fight AIDS and poverty in Haiti.
A roundtable discussion during the event on possible collaborations
between CUNY and the government of Haiti included training
health care workers, educating teachers and students, and
modernizing police force training.
In a letter to the University sent after her return to Haiti,
Aristide called the exchange “a wonderful opportunity
to see how concretely we can move our work forward on a broad
range of issues.” She also promised that “a significant
collaboration benefitting both the people of Haiti and the
students of CUNY” would be planned around the bicentennial
anniversary of Haiti’s independence in 2004.
Mrs. Aristide graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s in
Urban Legal Studies in 1984 from City College, were she was
president of the student government and an active member of
the Haitian Student Association.
CUNY has 4,800 degree-credit students of Haitian descent,
almost 58% of whom are woment. About three-quarters of those
students are freshmen and sophomores, and the numbers grow
larger every year.
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