Sabina Carlson Robillard Obituary, Death – Sabina Carlson Robillard became a significant leader in humanitarian relief efforts during her two decades as an activist. She insisted that the voices of those who were being assisted should always be the most prominent in every discussion; this helped her establish herself as a leader in the field. At a conference in Boston in 2010, she spoke about her work in Haiti earlier that year after an earthquake killed more than 200,000 people there. She said, “While you’re listening to me, there are 1.5 million conversations happening on the ground, and I’m here to ask you all how we’re listening to them.” She was speaking about her work in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake.
She had just turned 22 a few weeks prior to that speech, and she had a lot of experience as an activist. Her father, Ken Carlson, said that she started taking part in protests when she was in middle school and “was already thinking deeply about people who were suffering throughout the world.” Ms. Robillard, who lived in Cambridge, continued to keep herself busier than the majority of her coworkers who were in the best of health after she received the diagnosis of clear cell sarcoma while she was pregnant four years ago. While undergoing treatment for cancer, she worked as a consultant and an operations officer for humanitarian nonprofit organizations, and she also assisted in the upbringing of her daughter and stepdaughter.
Ms. Robillard even sent a text message to her academic adviser from her room at Massachusetts General Hospital the day before she passed away on November 16, at the age of 34. In the message, she requested that a meeting with her Tufts doctoral advisory committee be scheduled for a few days later. “In an unassuming way, she changed the course of how lots of money and people engaged in Haiti,” said her friend Jess Laporte of Waterbury, Vermont, a Haitian-American climate and racial justice activist who works with nonprofit organizations.
Jess Laporte is from Waterbury, Vermont. She is an activist for racial and environmental justice in Haiti. Ms. Robillard was a sophomore at Tufts University when she first came into contact with Dan Maxwell, a professor at Tufts University who later became her academic adviser. When she was 18 or 19 years old, he said, “she was already well known as a force of nature on campus,” and he used the phrase “force of nature.”