Most of Dr Henley Morgan’s staff, clients and close associates thought he had gone stark staring mad two years ago when he decided to relocate the head office of his successful consultancy business to the sprawling slums of Trench Town, Kingston.

But they are calling him a genius today.

“I can see now that it involved some amount of courage and maybe madness,” Morgan concedes, understating what he knows to be an extraordinary feat.

Morgan had spent 20 years building up his New Kingston-based business, Caribbean Applied Technology Centre Limited (CATC), in the process naming among his clients 12 Caribbean heads of Government and many blue chip companies in Jamaica and the region.

Over time, his business partners had included big names like Dr Blossom O-Meally Nelson, Dr Pat Hamilton and the late Lawson Calderon of St Lucia. He married a hot-looking and very bright woman, Dr Sandra Morgan, a top executive at Victoria Mutual Building Society (VMBS).

So what, all of a sudden, had come over Henley Morgan that he should be seized with the desire to risk everything and move his corporate offices to inner-city Trench Town, a place known in the folklore as one of the baddest and most depressed communities in the capital city’s feared west end?

“I think if I knew everything at the time, I would not have done it,” Morgan says. “I was in survival mode. The adrenalin was pumping.”

A little known fact is that Morgan had antecedents in Trench Town. His late father, Cyril Arthur Morgan, who operated a branch of the Texas College at Maldon, St James, had moved in his later years to Trench Town where he pastored a church named the Mount Zion Baptist Church and became a legend of the ghetto.

Henley Morgan was studying in the United States at the time, but he kept in close touch with his father’s work. He credits the senior Morgan with introducing now Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller to the communities as a girl of 17 and became like a second father to her. And he chuckles happily when he recalls that Portia had said to him recently: “You are doing just what your father had done before you.”

Back home from the States, Morgan began to develop an interest in Trench Town and started attending the little church his father had pastored, now renamed the Praise Tabernacle at 22 1/2 Greenwich Street, Kingston 13.

At the same time, he joined the company that was later to become Caribbean Applied Technology Centre (CATC). It was then a subsidiary of the Nebraska oil and gas firm, Inter-North Inc, which eventually merged with Houston Natural Gas to become the giant Enron. The CATC concept was born out of the Rockefeller Committee of the 1980s.

A former black power activist, Morgan found himself worrying. “I was selling my brain but I didn’t own any part of the enterprise.” He began to agitate. The long and the short of it was that the company was sold to him and Calderon, who was later to die tragically in a flood swollen gully that also claimed the life of Pauline Gray, the former executive director of the Jamaica Exporters Association.

By 1992, Morgan had acquired majority ownership in CATC and established himself as a management guru across the region. But he was not satisfied.

The dynamic Rev Errol Henry

Morgan continued to attend church in Trench Town and transitioned, as he puts it, into church leadership, though he was never ordained. Then he led a merger between Praise Tabernacle and Inner-city Ministries for Christ, pastored by the dynamic Rev Errol Henry. The merged entity was called Praise City International (PCI), with Morgan as chairman and Henry as senior pastor.

Henry, who was phenomenally popular in the ghetto, founded the Teacher Income Protection (TIP) Friendly Society to provide insurance and financial services to over 12,000 members. TIP today has assets valuing $700 million.

PCI itself is known throughout Trench Town, Arnett ‘Concrete Jungle’ Gardens, Wilton ‘Rema’ Gardens, Jones Town, Denham Town and Whitfield Town for its social services. It operated a banana chip factory known by the brand “Better Taste” which employed 48 persons from the communities. Hurricane Ivan put paid to that enterprise when it devastated the banana industry, Morgan discloses.

The company also runs a grocery store and offers education and training programmes “which have touched hundreds of lives”, according to Morgan. But still he was not happy and in 2004 his dissatisfaction became chronic.

“I was extremely concerned about Jamaica and whether there was any future here for my children – Alyssa, 17 and Adriel, 10. At the same time, I was beginning to wonder whether my future was in social work, like my father before me,” recounts Morgan.

One night the ghost of Trench Town visited the Morgan household. The next morning he was stricken with the desire to move his corporate offices from New Kingston to 85 West Road, Trench Town, Kingston 12.

“I made that decision and it was a momentous decision,” he recalls in an interview with the Sunday Observer. He knew the huge risk he was taking, especially where his clients were concerned.

“Corporations are neither philantrophists nor misers. They just live by rules. I had no way of telling whether the corporate entity (CATC) would survive the move.”

Nobody else had done it. The nearest formal, traditional business was Radio Jamaica (RJR) and that was on the fringes. All such businesses had moved out of the area and serviced it from outside, something he describes as “a great evil”. Everybody looked at Morgan with disbelief. and concern about his mental health.

“Staff, clients, nobody could understand. Ninety-eight per cent of the staff had never been to Trench Town. But I realised that mine was a knowledge business and people did not have to come to my office. There was the computer and the telephone. It really didn’t matter where I was coming from.”

Agency for Inner-City renewal

He spent millions of dollars setting up the Trench Town office and opened with four staff. The complex consisted of CATC, Praise City International and the Agency for Inner-City Renewal (AIR), a non-profit community development entity.

Not unexpectedly, some clients left. Others began to hedge. “They thought I was becoming a religious zealot,” Morgan relates.

But the people of the ghetto did not second-guess, and soon Morgan found himself being more absorbed in his work than he had at first anticipated. In a curious kind of way, the people seemed to be replacing the don with Morgan.

“The lines started from as early as 6:30 am,” he says. “They come about things such as jobs, school-related issues, things they would look to the don for. Some have even suggested that I be the next don, but I discourage them. We have a very intimate relationship with the communities. We meet with all the dons and ‘shottas’. My average day there is from 7:30 am to 7:30 pm.”

Under the Agency for Inner-City Renewal, Morgan and his team operate a business incubator, a tried and true method of encouraging micro-enterprises in business-unfriendly areas, offering low rental, shared services, business facilities and joint marketing. CATC serves as the hub for the business incubator, through an arrangement with UTech’s Technology Innovation Centre.

The National Housing Trust (NHT) entered the partnership to help generate employment, which would facilitate payment for homes built by the Trust. Then came VMBS, Life of Jamaica, the Small Business Development Centre, the Jamaica Youth Business Trust and the COPE Micro-Enterprise Lending Agency.

One of the early successes, Morgan can’t help boasting, is the Personal Computer Resources Limited offering hardware repairs and network maintenance services. A grocery store was recently opened at Maxfield with assistance from AIR. The team is on the verge of signing an agreement with Gas Products to distribute cooking gas throughout the area, to be owned by community members.

Their most innovative venture, he says, is the Miracle Club which currently mentors 42 young people, selected for their hunger for success. Leading psychiatrist Valerie Freckleton has been brought in to do psychological re-mapping of “people who were told so often that they could not succeed”.

Under the programme, the University College of the Caribbean has just negotiated over $2 million in scholarships for inner-city kids to pursue Associate Degrees.

Morgan predicts that businesses from across Jamaica will be able to operate in the inner-city communities through the group of companies they have established.

And so far, security is not an issue, he says. “I used to have two security firms, with total electronic surveillance at my New Kingston offices. Now I can work all night without fear. My security cost is zero.”

After two years, Morgan now reports that the volume of his business has started to increase again. “They are beginning to see what I was trying to do, as a social entrepreneur, as someone who goes where angels fear to tread, where only fools will venture and where the government has abdicated its responsibilities, to take the wasted human assets and engage them into productive enterprise.”