JAMALCO BAUXITE company has presented the island's three universities the University of the West Indies (UWI), the University of Technology (UTech) and Northern Caribbean University (NCU), with a wide assortment of reference books for their libraries.
The reference materials were secured mainly from Alcoa Foundation in the United States, from which the local educational fraternity has been benefiting, through Jamalco, for the past 14 years.
Pamella White, Jamalco's community development administrator, in explaining the basis for the latest mass handing over of books to local beneficiaries, noted that between 30,000 and 40,000 books were received annually from Alcoa Foundation and other sources in the United States. She said this year, the special focus was on tertiary level books, hence the special donations to the university libraries.
In the past, the company has donated to educational institutions from the basic school level up to the Ministry of Education itself. However, over time, said Ms. White, there had been a recognition of a need to have the resources better streamlined in order to effect greater benefits among the recipients and end users.
"What we have done is to restructure the previous arrangements into what we call an 'Alcoa Business System', which is a structured way of handling and distributing the books. Now we employ summer students tertiary level students, including from the very universities receiving here today to properly unpack the books, stamp them, sought them out and package them for very orderly distribution," explained Ms. White.
She said the summer workers were all drawn from around Jamalco's operating areas as a further component of the company's community outreach programme.
Celia Davidson Francis, executive director of the Jamaica Chapter of the UWI Alumni Association, one of the UWI representatives at the handing-over ceremony, thanked Jamalco for its interest in the educational welfare of the university population.
In lauding the ongoing collaborative efforts with the company, she suggested that the programme could be further enhanced by having the intended beneficiary institutions outline their specific areas of need prior to the acquisition of the books. That would, she said, "ensure that the editions that come are exactly targeted to the student groups and the various disciplines and faculties, so that as many students as possible can benefit from them."
