MONTEGO BAY, St James-

The Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MBCC) will adopt and donate $120,000 to a participating team in one of the St James football Association’s leagues.

The money will help the team take care of their expenses through the duration of the season.

Pauline Reid, president of the Chamber, told the Observer West that the organisation was fully committed to the project, which was announced at last Tuesday’s press launch of the Captain’s Bakery Knock Out at the Wexford Hotel on Gloucester Avenue.

She said the organisation would meet with the St James FA to first identify the team and set out the guidelines for their involvement.

The Chamber’s gesture comes against the backlground of the criticisms that Reid, the guest speaker at last Tuesday’s function, levelled at the business community.

“There are some organisations that will give assistance and I commend them for their efforts, but of course there are many who operate in this community, make their wealth here, they live here, they sleep here but they refuse to give back just a little to the community. I have one word for that – selfishness,” she said.

Added Reid: “There are those who also disassociate themselves from the hunger and poverty that exists, and they turn a blind eye to the social decay of our country and yet they are the first ones to cry out when things go awry.”

She was also critical of the “big corporations that feel that their sponsorship should be confined only to the corporate areas. They forget conveniently that they operate in western Jamaica and that in a lot of instances this is where they make their money, yet because of social ill, we in the ‘rural areas’ are marginalised when it comes to getting assistance from them. Let me use this opportunity to ask them to rethink their positions – some of our greatest leaders and sporting icons have come from the west and we will continue to excel at what we do here.”