FOR 10 years, amidst the murders and gang mayhem that still haunts Rockfort, a movement has been building in the East Kingston community to transform its image and its culture of conflict and criminality.

“We must take absolutely no pleasure in the fact that in the 1960s, during the ’70s and into the ’80s, the community produced more than its fair share of wanted men, and that we had a poor and often violent relationship with the police,” says Angela Brown-Burke.

But with 112 murders up to November 6 this year – more than double last year’s 60 in a comparative period – East Kingston still has much to do to shake its culture of criminality.

Brown-Burke, one of nine directors of the Rockfort-East Kingston Community Trust, says the self-financed group emerged in 1995, and functions as a conduit for residents to have a say in how their community is governed.

Its newest initiative is its ‘Living the Livity’ project, which, among other objectives, proposes a tribunal that eschews reprisals, and embraces dispute resolution as the answer to conflicts.

In June, when the tribunal was proposed, the trust affirmed at a community meeting that it would “not impose any sanctions or penalties that come into conflict with the laws of Jamaica” – read as a denunciation of reprisals – nor will it support jungle justice of mob killings.

Brown-Burke, herself a councillor in the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation, says Rockfort is “in transition” and refuses to be grouped with other downtown volatile communities, though they share similar traits.

“We reject the term ‘inner-city’, whatever this is supposed to mean,” she said.

In fact, the trust has put together a document titled Rockfort in Transition, a small 13-page booklet outlining decisions and proposals made in consultations over the period May to August 2005.

Rockfort is currently pinning economic hope on jobs from the planned US$100 million expansion of the Caribbean Cement Company plant.

To prepare, its residents have been through skills training sessions to qualify them for the jobs to flow from the expansion project.

Since August, the trust has also dusted off plans in the works since 2000 for the creation of a commercial venture, which it calls the Rock Spring Craft Village and Entertainment Park.

Initially, Rockfort had pinned hopes for customers for its village on the Port Royal Development Project, a touted tourist attraction that was projected to bring in some 5,000 cruise visitors daily.

The village plan floundered in 2002 when it became clear that the Port Royal project was a non-starter, and because of the dust nuisance from the cement plant.

Now the trust is looking to pitch its village at Kingston residents, and plans to incorporate within it a reggae museum, horse riding trail, mountain climbing, and a bamboo grove.

Alongside the planning, Brown-Burke also insists that a new feeling of well-being is emerging in Rockfort – that school attendance, generally, is steadily increasing, that some signs of entrepreneurism are emerging, and that the young are finally sensing change.

She acknowledges, however, that strong and sustained inroads in crime will take time, and is a long-term goal.

In the meantime, the trust has established a structure to carry out the business of the community and lobby its interests – including a council, which has representation from 17 interest groups, and an executive committee.

Its nine directors are: Brown-Burke, her husband Paul Burke, Gwyneth Barrett, Jacqueline Lewis, Cynthia Wilson, Anthony Brown, Samuel Buchanan, Michael Murray and Ricardo Wellington.

The trust’s membership includes a number of interest groups, including the Jamaica Constabulary Force, senior citizens, churches, Justices of the Peace as well as the elected political representatives.

Each interest group has at least one, and some up to four representatives on the council of the trust.

Member of Parliament and Minister of Commerce Science and Technology Phillip Paulwell, who both advises and finances the trust, gets a report on the group’s activities at the end of each quarter, says Brown-Burke.

The Rockfort Trust’s three-year goals:

1 To promote wider and improved education and training and to provide practical support for all the education and training institutions within the wider Rockfort community.

2 To work together to develop economic programmes geared at employment, income generation and for community wealth creation.

3 To make our community stronger and safer and to promote law and order.

4 To create a real and genuine sense of community and togetherness within the wider Rockfort community.

5 To improve the physical infrastructure and the physical environment, particularly with those issues affecting the health and well-being of the residents of the community.