Delroy Chuck (left), MP for St. Andrew North East, which includes the Grants Pen area, and Dr. Peter Phillips, National Security Minister, share a joke yesterday. They were at the USAID/Kingston Restoration Company's Peace-and- Prosperity Project launch of the Grants Pen Peace Centre, Shortwood Road. In the background is Tanique McKay, a beneficiary under the programme. - Dennis Coke
For Tanique McKay, 21, of Grants Pen, a jobless mother and bored high school graduate "with nothing to do", the bait some months ago was the promise of $50-a-head for recruiting other young people to be a part of a peace project.
Though sceptical about the results, she joined, not only for the benefits, but to help sensitise others on how they could reduce violence in the sometimes violent inner-city area.
Tanique is enrolled in an all-expenses-paid nine-month cosmetology course under the Kingston Restoration Company (KRC)/US AID "Peace and Prosperity Project" (PPP) that aims to "ensure sustainable economic and social development" in the Grants Pen and Standpipe communities in St Andrew. "Statistics indicate that many of the crimes committed in Jamaica are concentrated within and around inner-city communities," Mosina Jordan, Mission Director of US AID said. "We believe that violence in inner-city communities is not inevitable; we can change the sense of hopelessness that many people in these communities face."
Thus, the first US AID Caribbean Peace Centre was launched at 32 Shortwood Road yesterday, and should help residents reduce violence in the area through increasing employment and entrepreneurship opportunities and improving community capacity for conflict resolution within the two communities.
KRC is the implementing agency of the three-year long project driven by the mission to foster an improved quality of life for the residents of the two communities and will, among other things, involve alternate dispute resolution training, community policing, sports, improve buildings, streets and public spaces, contribute to urban job generation, institute education for change and enable community-based organisations and the private and public sector to work in a harmonious way at the renewal of the two communities.
