PRIME Minister Andrew Holness has appealed to the church to assist the Government in getting Jamaicans to embrace a spirit of volunteerism in managing the environment and sustaining the country’s development agenda.

Holness told last Friday’s launch of this year’s Workers’ Week/Labour Day programme at Jamaica House that volunteerism will have to play an essential role in sustaining the environment, and the church would have to play a very important role in that effort.

The prime minister said that the Government’s efforts to create economic growth and job creation have to share equal billing with the pursuit of the sustainable development, if they are to be sustainable.

“That means we will be engaging the people of Jamaica, through the education and health sectors, media and communications, in getting us to voluntarily use our efforts and our labour to secure our environment,” he said.

“We will be institutionalising this policy by building a partnership with the people and organisations.

We can achieve so much if we are coordinated, organised and motivated.

We can contribute and build the country through volunteerism,” he stated. Holness said that the world was “slowly but surely” coming to the realisation that it has to manage the environment.

However, he pointed out that Jamaica has not yet been able to make the link with the environment as an important priority.

But he said that his Government intends to ensure that while it pursues economic growth and job creation, or its “prosperity agenda”, that it also pursues the sustainable development of the country and preservation of the environment. He said that one institution which will have to play a very important role in all of this is the church.

“In as much as I preach from this pulpit, you have a far more powerful pulpit, and I want to enlist the support of the church in bringing the message (to the people),” Holness stated. Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange, meanwhile, noted that the new Administration “is moving post-haste” to rekindle the spirit of volunteerism among Jamaicans.

“We know the value of volunteerism is infinite, especially in the absence of adequate budgets. We must search harder for more volunteers specifically from the middle class (because) at the grassroots level we already have volunteers in abundance,” she said.

She added that the Government was responding to the urgent need to clean up the environment, which has been seriously affected by the periodic pile-up of garbage, resulting in the spread of rodents, viruses and vector-borne diseases, as well as to unite the country around the partnership for prosperity.

Holness appealed to residents of Portmore, which will be the focus of attention during Workers’ Week, to volunteer their “time, labour and effort” to clean up their community.

“We want to have an impact on the breeding sites for mosquitoes and reduce the spread of the Zika Virus in Jamaica,” he said.

Workers Week/Labour Day 2016 is a collaborative effort between the Ministries of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, Labour and Social Security, Local Government and Community Development and Health.

Workers’ Week, which commences on May 15, will culminate on Labour Day, which will be observed on May 23 under the theme “For Health’s Sake… Keep it Clean”.