A 13-year-old St Mary organisation, established initially to help restore damaged infrastructure after Hurricane Gilbert, was yesterday morning named winner of the Michael Manley Foundation Award for Community Self-reliance.

Velma Walker, president of the Community Development Action Group (CDAG), received the trophy and $100,000 from Manley’s widow, Glynne, at the festive ceremony sprinkled with cultural presentations inside the Little Theatre in Kingston.

“The desire to build community is alive and well,” declared Dr Brian Meeks, chairman of the foundation, established three years ago to honour the memory of the former Jamaican prime minister who gained a reputation as a strong advocate of self-reliance.

Yesterday, Walker told guests at the ceremony that the CDAG, based in Woodside district, administered its programmes through seven committees:

* Education — responsible for organising lectures and discussions for the community; establishing a library for members to read; and supporting children’s homework and research;

* Tourism — which selects homes for visitors to stay; houses international students; organises tours of historical sites; and caters for visitors, teaching them methods of preparing Jamaican foods;

* Water and Sanitation — which helps purchase water tanks for families;

* Entertainment — responsible for working with drama groups in the community;

* Refreshment — which plans culinary items for functions and prepares food for groups and individuals who visit Woodside;

* Care — whose members plan for the safety and well-being of senior citizens, single women and children, as well as assist the disabled; and

* Finance and Fund-raising — which makes plans for financial support of projects and conducts income-generating activities.

According to David Coore, one of the foundation’s judges and a former government minister in the Michael Manley administration in the 1970s, the CDAG fulfilled a set of strict criteria, that include community initiative and participation, gender equity, medium-term sustainability, youth involvement, and social and environmental impact.

The group bettered 16 others vying for the award, one of which was the Clarendon Association for Street People (CLASP), which received special commendation for their work.

The CLASP has a membership of 130 and is managed by 16 volunteers. It began in 1995 at the Clarendon Parish Council at Denbigh Hill Top.

Prime Minister P J Patterson, who was invited to speak at the ceremony, said that it was fitting that the Award for Community Self-reliance was being presented on Emancipation Day.

“The slaves who were freed that ‘August Morning’ left the plantations and went forth with unparalleled courage, determination and dignity to give expression to the most glorious examples of self-reliance that Jamaica has ever seen,” Patterson said.

“These were the pioneers of Jamaica’s first experiments in planned, rural community development firmly based in self-reliance,” he said. “They were the men and women who, assisted largely by Baptist… Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries, established the free villages.”

Patterson spoke on Jamaica’s post-1962 development, saying that independence has increased access to secondary education from 11 per cent to 80 per cent; that it has increased the number of secondary schools in Jamaica from 40 to 595 as at 2001; that tertiary institution enrolment increased from one per cent to 10 per cent today and that life expectancy increased from 63 to 67 for men and 70 to 73 for women as at 2001.

Noting that globalisation is shaping the terms and conditions of Jamaica’s development, the prime minister said: “It is the biblical David and Goliath story all over again — where the small and the weak are pitted against large, strong entities… However, David triumphed and so can we,” he said.

He hailed the achievements of Jamaica’s national heroes, as well as those of our modern leaders and named Hugh Shearer, Edward Seaga and Michael Manley as the ones who “guided us through the years since Independence and kept the ship of state afloat while we have grown and developed”.

“For the cynics among us,” Patterson said, “yes, we have grown and developed.”

The guest speaker, Professor Rex Nettleford, vice-chancellor at the University of the West Indies, said that “while slavery was abolished, the plantation society persisted”. He asserted that worker and boss relations mirror master and slave relations on the plantation and argued that Jamaica continued to have domestic decline, lack of integrity, racial/colour inequality, wanton corruption in public life and private greed.

As a solution, Nettleford offered participatory democracy as the method to the attainment of equality and social justice.