SITUATED in the secluded hills of St Andrew, the Dallas Castle community is sporadically racked by violence and faces high levels of unemployment, but through cooperation and collaboration, the residents have been able to experience a beam of hope.

Last Friday, the community hosted a Community Open Day to open their new Skills Training Centre. The open day, put on by the Good Hope Partners Benevolent Society, was an extravagant event, which brought together several partners working together for the upliftment of Dallas Castle and surrounding communities.

Representatives from the Digicel Foundation – which was chief sponsor in the development of the training centre — HEART Trust/NTA, LIFE, Good Hope Agro-Producers, Jamaica Business Development Corporation and Environmental Foundation of Jamaica, among others, were present along with the children and adults from the community.

While the children slid down slides, bounced in bounce-a-bouts and played various games, the proud sponsors kept the programme flowing smoothly, showing off the training centre to the media and introducing various opportunities to the interested residents.

Major General Robert Neish, executive director of the Digicel Foundation, said they were approached by the Good Hope Partners Benevolent Society for assistance and after visiting the community, they decided that it had the management and sustainability for this project.

“We talked to the people in the community and very soon we realised that they have good leadership within the community, they have a commitment to lifting their community to something for all the people; the children, the parents, the farmers and so on,” Neish said.

So the foundation embarked on a journey to help these people and Neish said they put in tables, chairs and supplied computers. They made partitions in what was just one big hall and created a hospitality room, a computer room and a lecture room, as well as other facilities. A bedroom suite was also furnished to be used in the hospitality training.

“They saw where they wanted to go further because they do other things to enhance it; what they came to us with was to ask for aid with the enhancing of their community centre, and so what we did was enhance the two areas of training,” Neish told Career & Education.

Michelle Christie is the project development specialist of HEART Trust/NTA which has partnered with the community, and she is responsible for the training of the prospective students of the Skills Training Centre.

“So a lot of them are in the situation where although they see the desire and they know what they want, they don’t have the basic infrastructure or the tools and equipment; and that’s where Digicel comes in,” Christie said.

She believes the project is a great initiative and is happy to see the private sector come on board in this way.

The skills training centre is to serve several communities surrounding Dallas Castle, such as Cane River, Bito, Halls Delight and Constitution Hill, which make up the Good Hope region.

Kelvin Clarke, who is the chairman of the Good Hope Partners Benevolent Society, is very excited about the completion and opening of the centre.

“I am just happy I could be a part of the process because what I believe personally is that if you stay back and do nothing, in a matter of time it reaches you personally, and I can actually make a difference playing my part, I can a play a little part and you play a little part and the puzzle comes together,” Clarke said.

Clarke, who was born and raised in the community, says his organisation, comprises other young people from his community and was developed out of a need to combat the violence in the area. He said the location of the community makes it a hideout for criminals and they infiltrate the minds of the community youth and form gangs.

“If the minds of our people are empowered, they can make the choices; we are actually seeing the fruit of it where we are having a reduction in that sense,” Clarke said.

He said the centre is helping to fulfil the developmental needs of the community. As such he said they partnered with HEART Trust/NTA to train and certify the residents so that they could become more employable and able to explore entrepreneurial initiatives in a more sustainable way than they would have the capacity to do otherwise.

“We recognise that that is a deficiency we had over the years and we are glad that the Digicel Foundation came on board when they did and helped us in a big way to establish this, because it was a community centre that has been depreciated over the years, not being utilised, no socialisation component, and as a result you find that criminal activity started to set in,” Clarke said.

He added: “Having a skills training facility here to educate them is not just about the socialisation component, but to occupy the minds of our young people positively, engaging them in healthful sporting activity and at the same time educating and training them to be entrepreneurs and to become employable.”