CCSI wants new ideas helpful to their projects

The Caribbean Child Support Initiative (CCSI) is appealing to the society on a whole to put forward ideas as to what can be done to increase awareness of their Roving Care Givers (RCG) programme.{{more}}

At a meeting held on June 12, Colleen Wint-Smith of the Barbados-based Barnard van Leer Foundation asked the media, Ministry of Education and other concerned parties to come up with ideas that could be helpful to their project.

The CCSI hopes to have a newsletter in circulation by early next year. It was also suggested that churches be used as a way of not only publicising the RCG, but also to involve the entire community in the project.

The CCSI is hoping to use the newsletter to advocate and raise visibility for the RCG and also as a way of fundraising. Some of the RCG’s success stories will be published in the newsletter, whether it is by testimonial, artwork or essays written by children who have passed through the RCG program.

Roving Care Givers go out into the community and help families that are in need. In St Vincent and the Grenadines, there are Roving Care Givers in Bequia and Sandy Bay. The programme also exists in Grenada, Dominica and St. Lucia.

The RCG programme deals with early childhood development; their interest is in children from birth to the age of 3. The RCG state that early childhood development is important because it deals with and nips in the bud, problems that may later arise in adolescence if not detected from early on. They would like one day to be able to influence public policy and also to influence how we work with our children to ensure that the environment is conducive to their education. The CCSI is hoping that the newsletter will heighten visibility and therefore entice the corporate sector, overseas patriotic groups and the media to lend sponsorship to their RCG program. (VM)