Managing Director of Scotiabank Jamaica William 'Bill' Clarke (left) jokes with Dr. Denise Eldermire-Shearer (second right), who represented the Hugh Shearer Foundation, named after her husband, a former Prime Minister and trade unionist. With them are Barrington Dawes, Deputy General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress and the first Hugh Shearer Foundation research fellow; and Jane Taylor, project manager at Point Hill Diagnostic Reading Centre in St. Catherine. - Rudolph Brown/Staff Photographer THE SCOTIABANK Jamaica Foundation is donating $14 million to the Hugh Shearer Foundation and the Point Hill Diagnostic Reading Centre in St. Catherine, to fund educational programmes.
The Foundation, which focuses primarily on funding health and education projects, has contributed over $218 million to such projects over its seven-year existence.
At a ceremony yesterday at the Scotiabank Centre, downtown Kingston, William 'Bill' Clarke, the bank's managing director, and Marie Powell, the Foundation's executive director, handed over the first instalment of $2.5 million each to both institutions. Mr. Clarke explained that the donations to both institutions would be paid out over a three-year period.
The Point Hill Diagnostic Reading Centre will receive $7.5 million in total for the provision of a specialist education teacher. The centre is being established to improve literacy levels for students in and around the Point Hill community, and will start operation in September 2004.
Meanwhile, $6.5 million will be donated to the Hugh Shearer Foundation that was launched in June this year to fund a post graduate scholarship in trade union studies or international relations, provide training in the care of the elderly and the provision of basic school education in rural Jamaica, starting in Martha Brae, Trelawny, the birth place of Hugh Shearer, former Prime Minister and trade unionist.
Also, the first Hugh Shearer Foundation Research Fellow, Mr. Barrington Dawes, was announced yesterday. Mr. Dawes will start his Masters in Business Administration, specializing in Industrial Relations and Negotiations at the University of the West Indies (UWI), in May 2004. He is the Deputy General-Secretary of the Trade Union Congress.
