About Junior
Junior Bernard, the founder of Pranzel Group, is dedicated to addressing Haiti's education crisis through his innovative platforms like pranzeleliteschool.com. He earned his Communication degree with a full-ride scholarship and developed his professional career in marketing and technology. Junior recently won Alvernia University's Four Under Forty Achievement Award, celebrating his philanthropic leadership.
I am Junior Bernard
Watch Junior’s Commencement Speech
Watch Junior’s Commencement Speech
Who Am I?
I was born in poverty in a remote Haitian town where I witnessed others die due to hunger and preventable diseases.
At 19 years old, in the pursuit of my dream, I went through a near-death experience when I survived a tragic car crash. 6 months later, I ran for my life amidst the 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed over 200,000 people.
All my life, I have had to face adversity, including begging on the street of a foreign land to survive and always saying yes to my dreams when others said no.
Today, here’s what I know for sure: The greatest treasure you will ever receive is your life. Don’t simply exist. Live for something big.
Junior’s Story
Inspiring, miraculous, and gripping – Even these words aren’t enough to describe Junior’s unforgettable life experience.
He was born in a small coastal Haitian town called Jérémie. As one of five children, Junior grew up witnessing others in his community, including children, die due to starvation and preventable diseases.
These tragedies motivated Junior to take matters into his own hands, realizing early on that his parents, who could barely feed him and his siblings, would not have the means to afford them a good education and a better future.
The Dream and Challenges Ahead
As a teenager, Junior decided that moving to the United States was his only chance at escaping poverty and getting an education. Those who learned about the boy’s dream laughed and made fun of him claiming he was too stupid to see that, “a boy like him from an impoverished family with no resources nor connection could never make it out of Haiti.”
Junior was resilient and unbelievably focused. To pursue his dream, he learned English from a tattered English-to-French dictionary he found in a trash can in a neighbor’s yard. To practice the language, he followed around any American visitors he came across in his hometown, Jeremie. Junior’s efforts started to pay off when, months into his learning venture, he was hired as an interpreter to translate English to Haitian Creole for some of the same Americans he used to follow around town.
On June 18th, 2009, Junior was traveling back home from doing a translating job in a Toyota Landcruiser when the vehicle drove off a cliff. It flipped several times as it crashed down the hill and nose-dove into a dangerous river, killing three passengers including the driver. Junior, despite not knowing how to swim, managed to save the life of a young American woman sitting next to him in the midst of the van sinking.
“That moment has reaffirmed me there is truly a God because there is absolutely no way I could have survived this on my own, let alone making it out of the crash intact,” Junior said during an interview.
As fate would have it, the next chapters of Junior’s life would prove to be brutally challenging: He ended up dropping out of high school due to hardships and fleeing to the Dominican Republic in hope of a better life. But soon after, he became a beggar on the streets of the foreign land. Junior returned home a few months later only to survive the magnitude-7.0 devastating earthquake in Port-Au-Prince that killed over 200,000 Haitians and left over one million homeless.
The Unlikely Encounter That Changed Everything
Junior’s life struggles finally took a different turn for the better when, upon returning home to Jeremie and going back to doing translations for foreign visitors, he unexpectedly met an American entrepreneur named Billy Barr who was volunteering in Haiti with his oldest son, Brian. Billy was so impressed by Junior’s charisma and drive that, soon after meeting him, he wrote to his wife, Claudia, back in the U.S. and said,
“I met this very nice young man who was assigned to work with us as our interpreter. He’s probably the most conscientious person we met down here. It would be ashamed to have someone that is so intelligent and ambitious mired in poverty because of a lack of funds. We must do something.”
Billy and Claudia Barr wasted no time in helping to fulfill Junior’s dream of moving to the U.S. and obtaining an education. Today, Junior credits how far he has come to the Barr family who helped “brighten his entire life,” as he often says.
Junior Today
Junior’s relentless fight against economic disparities is growing stronger than ever:
After opening a nonprofit that has helped to cover school tuitions for several hundreds of children by far, today Junior wants to do more. Joining along with other Haitian professionals, Junior recently founded Pranzel Group—a social enterprise working to solve one of Haiti’s biggest challenges: Inadequate education. Pranzel’s mission to facilitate education for all in Haiti through technology.
In Junior’s own words, “Similarly to what the Barr family did for me…if we take the time to see each other’s needs and care enough to actually find ways to address the major issues around us, imagine how fast we can transform this world we call our own.”
