MYF, PMI partner to empower youths to change their lives

Nine young men, including high school students and unattached youth from Trench Town and Whitfield Town in Kingston, were offered life-changing tools in a very user friendly way, at an innovative Youth Empowerment Workshop held from October 19-22. This took the form of a residential camp far from the communities where they live and have to deal with gang-related violence and pressures to join criminal gangs themselves.

Held at the Eltham Training Centre in Ocho Rios, St Ann, the camp was the joint effort of The MultiCare Youth Foundation (MYF) and the Peace Management Initiative (PMI). The young men were all enrolled in MYF’s mentoring programme and attended, along with their mentors. The workshop is part of a wider co-impact programme funded by USAID through its Local Partner Development Programme (LPD) targeting 100 male youth from volatile communities in Kingston, St Andrew, St Catherine, and St James who are assessed to be at medium to high risk of getting involved in crime and violence. The programme seeks to offer life-skills training, mentorship, and internship placement and other coordinated interventions aimed at reducing their risk levels and increasing their participation in economic and social-growth activities. The camp offers insight into how to better treat with each young man individually who are often treated as a homogenous group.

NEGATIVE BEHAVIOUR

LPD’s Programme Specialist for Youth Crime and Violence Prevention, Machel Stewart, described the four-day training camp as “a great way of providing the youth with an understanding of a lot of things that they need to do to resist negative behaviour so they can change their own lives and circumstancesd espite what they are returning to their communities to experience”.

He added: “The mentors at the same time are given more tools, which will enable them to understand and bond with the youth, to be able to give them more encouragement and skills to succeed in making their own life decisions. The residential nature of the camp is very important because it allows the members to spend time in unstructured sessions, not just being spoken at and lectured to, but just to sit and lyme and relax, and to understand each other, from a strictly human perspective.”

MYF Project Manager Taneshia Stoney noted that an important benefit of the collaboration with the PMI was the interaction between mentors and mentees from the two partner organisations: “MYF’s mentor programme is more structured, while the PMI’s might be more fluid. PMI mentors come from the community – some were involved in some activities and have left that life behind. MYF mentors tend to be from the corporate world, so this gave us a different perspective.”

Stoney explained that this type of workshop, while a first for MYF, is a regular tool used by the PMI and that it usually accommodates 60 persons. However, enrollment was reduced on this occasion in order to observe COVID-19 protocols. She also noted that the youth attending were very receptive, and “opened up” about a lot of their experiences.

MYF mentee Andrew Ormsby, from the Maxfield community, who attended the workshop, endorsed Stoney’s positive assessment, noting that he liked the camp setting and adding: “I could actually hold a vibes and chill. As the sessions went on, we could actually talk, and nobody was judging you. I learned a couple things like how to be a better person, and I can use that, carry it to my community and to certain people in my community, I can teach them how we can be a better person and move on with life so we don’t deal with certain things.”