SHE gave birth to one child but she has mothered hundreds in her 29 years serving, protecting, and reassuring from the ranks of the Jamaica Constabulary.

For her efforts, which began when she was a constable fresh out of training school and stationed at the Hunt’s Bay Police Station in the St Andrew South Division, deputy superintendent of police and acting commander of the K9 Division Ivel Calder was last Thursday among 16 adults from various disciplines honoured for impacting the lives of Jamaican children during the inaugural staging of the Children’s Advocate’s Recognition Awards at Jamaica Pegasus hotel in St Andrew.

Calder, who has served in numerous capacities, sections and divisions, was described by the Office of the Children’s Advocate as “a strong advocate for the empowerment of children”, beginning as far back as 1995.

“When I first left the police academy and I was stationed at the St Andrew South Division, I was the leader of Seivwright Gardens Police Youth Club. It was defunct, and I reactivated it,” Calder told the Jamaica Observer Thursday.

By the time she was transferred from the division she knew there was no turning back.

“My work with children continued. I was sent to the Area 4 headquarters where I became a member of the then Community Relations Branch. Part of our mandate was youth empowerment. We did various programmes for youth, we organised educational programmes and supervised summer programmes,” Calder shared.

In 2016 she became fully immersed.

“I went to the Kingston Central Division in 2016. I was the territorial officer there with responsibility for community safety and security matters. One of the programmes we did was a summer programme where we took children from the communities around the division and engaged them for two, sometimes three weeks in programmes geared towards building life-coping skills,” Calder said.

In 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, her mothering took on an added dimension.

“I was transferred to the Canine Division in the peak of COVID, and one of the things I realised was that my colleagues were out there on the front line doing work for everybody else [but] our children during the summer had nobody to care for them. And so the thought [came] of continuing a summer programme but this time it was geared towards members – both sworn and unsworn [ancillary workers, et cetera],” she said.

Now three years from leaving the ranks, Calder wants to pass on the baton.

To her unknown successor she says, “You have to love these kinds of things to want to do it. Your heart has to be in programmes like these for you to make the effort to find the resources and sponsors. It’s rewarding when you see them come in the first day and everybody is shy and reserved because they are coming from different homes, different backgrounds, but at the end of the programme you see a different child leaving from the one who came at the outset. So it’s quite fulfilling to see the changes in them, and sometimes the kind of discipline you instil, as well as the fact that they are leaving with skills they can use: first aid, conflict resolution.”