On Sunday, Jamaicans held hands across the globe, symbolically, under the aegis of four of the world’s largest service organisations representing millions of charity-minded members, to kick off activities marking Celebrate Community Week 2025, an interesting concept.

The service clubs — all familiar to Jamaicans — are Kiwanis International; Lions Clubs International; Optimist International; and Rotary International, without whom countless people in the poorest countries, including Jamaica, would have lived and died in their perpetual squalor.

Celebrate Community Week, we are told, is a global movement that “highlights the power of collaboration in service”.

As Ms Sheron Gilzean, Kiwanis Club of Constant Spring president, said in a story in yesterday’s Jamaica Observer: “Each year, millions of members across the globe take part in joint projects, setting aside individual banners to work together on issues that matter most. The initiative is a reminder that communities grow stronger when groups choose cooperation over competition.”

Ms Gilzean could not have said it better. There are many organisations operating here, in which a cursory glance at their profile, constitution, programme agenda, and modus operandi would reveal a paucity of differences that would justify why they would not be working together.

For decades these service clubs have been cherished by grateful Jamaicans who benefited from their charity work, but seeing them as individual organisations vying for space. This global coming together is heralding a far greater and more effective future for them and the people they serve.

This year’s Celebrate Community Week is focusing on the environment, food insecurity, and hunger. In Jamaica, the clubs will come together for two main projects: On September 20 there will be the Food for Growth Initiative for Kids, which provides breakfast items to children in the inner-city community of Cassava Piece, St Andrew; followed the next day by their participation in International Coastal Clean-up Day 2025.

The Clean-up Day is in collaboration with the National Environmental & Planning Agency (NEPA), “thus reinforcing the link between nurturing young people and protecting the natural spaces they will inherit”, according to Ms Gilzean.

Locally, this effort brings together the Kiwanis Club of Constant Spring, the Lions Club of New Kingston, the Rotary Club of Kingston, the Royal Optimist Club of Kingston, the Optimist Club of Barbican Pines, and the Optimist Club of Harbour View. She explained that for the children who start their day with a proper meal, or the families who enjoy a cleaner shoreline, the benefits are immediate. But the broader message is just as important: When service clubs unite, their combined impact transforms lives.

“Celebrate Community Week is proof that while each club has its own traditions, our mission is shared to serve, to uplift, and to build a better tomorrow, one child, one community at a time,” Ms Gilzean emphasised.

This is a message that we, as a newspaper, would like to commend to other service organisations who would achieve way more if they pooled resources and ideas.

Congratulations to Kiwanis International, Lions Clubs International, Optimist International, and Rotary International for lighting the way.