CHILDREN’S advocate Betty Ann Blaine is no stranger to building organisations from the ground up. Hear the Children’s Cry and Youth Opportunities Unlimited are testament to her ability to do so… and without much funding.

It is that approach that Blaine, convener of the New Nation Coalition, says she intends to use to build a constituency organisation in South West St Catherine where she contested her first ever parliamentary election on April 4 but managed to get just under 200 votes.

The Jamaica Labour Party’s Everald Warmington was returned as the member of Parliament after resigning last month because he held United States citizenship when he was nominated for the 2007 general elections.

“I’m going to set up a constituency office, and we are getting ready to begin working with the people — bottom up,” Blaine told the Observer in a post-election interview last week.

“We’re going to practise what I’ve always practised, because you know my work is community development and working with youth. How we do it is that we don’t go in and tell the people what is good for them, we say to them tell us how you see your future here and how we can help you to help yourself. So that is my plan,” she explained.

Blaine, who spent two-and-a-half weeks campaigning, said one of the things that struck her the moment she went on the hustings was the size of the constituency, which, according to Electoral Office of Jamaica data, has 98 polling divisions and 35,513 voters on the November 2009 voters’ list.

“It’s a huge constituency, geographically and numerically, so my first move is going to be… to say to the citizens, let us break up the constituency into administrative zones, and then within those zones we want to set up local councils,” said Blaine.

According to Blaine, the constituency is too large to be effectively serviced by any one member of Parliament.

“Inside that constituency are huge housing schemes, some of them with over 800 houses. So I recognised immediately that even if you are the best MP you can’t effectively service that constituency, you have to break it down into bite-size administrative zones. So as a result, I suspect, of neglect and just the sheer size of it, most of it is not serviced by the MP,” she said.

“Everywhere we went people told us that they’ve been abandoned, neglected. In some places they told us that they’ve never seen the MP, ever,” Blaine said. “People showed me roads, that’s one of the problems, very bad roads. I went into an area… where they don’t have any running water for over a year.”

Given her experience working with communities, Blaine said she has some ideas about how to improve the lives of people in the constituency. However, she was clear that she wants those ideas to be driven by the people living there.

“For example,” she said, “when I went up into the interior north of the constituency, one of the things I noticed was that every single yard has numerous naseberry trees, and I said wow, can you imagine if we had the capacity to set up cottage industries up there to make naseberry jam and nectar. So there is a lot of potential, but it is going to require organisation, networking and getting people to help us to build, so that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do bottom-up work, and I’m going to bring other people with the skills and the expertise to come up there and help us. I’m going to invite the development agencies — both local and foreign — to come and help.”

Blaine also paid tribute to the people who voted for her on April 4 and assured them of her commitment to the constituency.

“I want to say to the close to 200 people of that constituency who cast their votes for us, that they are the heroes of Jamaica, the close to 200 people who stood up to say we’re taking a stand for decency and dignity, for respect for each other, for an end to the kind of ugly, tribal, divisive politics that we’ve run; that’s how I read those votes… and I just want to applaud them… because the rest of us have just stood back,” she said.

“That is one of the reasons why I completely confirmed in my mind that I will honour the trust of those people,” she added. “They’ve invested their faith and their trust in me and I’m going to honour that trust by representing them permanently.”