It’s easily and readily recognised that good, proactive leadership is essential to the organisation of any society. Sadly, it is a quality lacking all across Jamaica, which is one of the main reasons so many communities are dysfunctional.

It would appear, based on yesterday’s Sunday Observer, that in the once violence-torn St James community of Flanker, just outside Montego Bay, leadership is making a huge difference.

We refer of course to the self-help school feeding programme, initiated and organised by the staff of the Flanker Primary and Junior High. We are told by the school’s bursar, Mr Andre Hill that staff members conceptualised a pilot project using idle land on the school grounds for farming. The project was apparently triggered by a real and present need since, according to Mr Hill, “most of the children come (to school) without breakfast”.

Motivated by the recognition that ’empty bag can’t stan up’ the school’s staff set about dealing with this basic problem of hunger.

We are told that under the guidance and leadership of the school’s home and family department and with the input of Grade seven to nine students, the school farm is now producing chicken meat, eggs, guinea pigs and a range of vegetables and grain.

In the process, the students are being taught the skill of organic farming – likely to prove exceedingly valuable in today’s world increasingly dominated by health and environmental considerations.

No artificial fertiliser is used, according to head of the home and family department, Mrs Althea Ingram. Instead students are being taught to use guinea pig and chicken manure as well as the compost heap method.

So now the school is able to supplement its breakfast and lunch feeding programme from its own resources. Further, encouraged by the self-help initiative,US embassy staff and private company Hi Pro feeds have stepped in to help with top soil and feed.

We are heartened also by news that the community is fiercely protective of the school and its self-help project. To such an extent that we are told the school farm has not suffered from any theft so far.

” The community supports the school. Community members assist in the rearing of chickens, the slaughter and plucking of feathers. Community members volunteer to cook breakfast. We don’t have any problems with the people,” says school principal Mr Rupert Shaw.

Clearly then, leadership is also very much at work in the wider community. We suspect that the latest positive news out of Flanker is

yet more evidence of the fruits of social intervention involving a collaboration of public and private sector bodies.

Readers may recall the positive vibes that flowed from Flanker following efforts by police, the Peace Management Initiative, Jamaica Social Investment Foundation; Sandals Resorts, Sandals Foundation, the Social Development Commission and others to uplift the community, largely through skills, leadership training and job creation.

It seems to this newspaper that Flanker provides hard testimony of what can be achieved when leaders are committed ‘to never say die’ and that ‘where there is a will there is a way’.

All across Jamaica today, in school and community and at every level to the very top, we need much more of that.