GoodHeart | Andre Barnaby keeps his community clean
Published:Saturday | April 23, 2022 | 12:06 AMKeisha Hill/Senior Gleaner Writer
Andre Barnaby is on a quest to ensure that people in and around his community are actively keeping their environment clean. He has been providing decorated garbage bins that have been placed at strategic locations to motivate people to use them, and avoid littering their communities.
Barnaby, a resident of Eden Gardens in the Vineyard Town area of Kingston, likes to find ways to uplift those around him, and to find solutions to problems that generally go unnoticed. The 27-year-old graduate of Kingston College and The University of the West Indies, Mona, is motivated to give back, and help to improve his country.
“My motivation comes from my family and how I was grown up. They are always helping and, in turn, I got the trait, too, and as the sayings say, ‘do good and good will follow yuh’. I don’t have an organisation, but I work as an individual or alongside many charitable groups. I am looking to create one for myself in short order,” Barnaby said.
Many persons have benefited from Barnaby’s interventions, including children in his community that he assists with reading, writing and comprehension skills. He is a happy camper when the children do well and excel beyond their expectations.
“The sky is the limit and any feasible idea that one has can come to a reality with proper planning and confidence especially if it is in an area that the person is passionate. The power of writing, speaking and also social media has changed the dynamics of getting to persons and also of getting help to execute these projects,” Barnaby said.
DONATIONS DURING THE PANDEMIC
During the coronavirus pandemic while a youth parliamentarian, for East Kingston and Port Royal, Barnaby also installed and donated sanitising stations to the Windward Road Primary School, and also provided bins for several communities in the constituency.
“Everybody else was doing normal projects, so I tried to be different and spontaneous. I wanted to ensure that the students were safe during the pandemic. The principal and students were quite happy for our efforts,” Barnaby said.
“I also organised a day of prayer and encouragement with random persons along that same thoroughfare,” he said.
As a coach with the middle-distance athletes at Kingston College, he is also a mentor to these students. “Coaching is a lot like mentoring and is understandable in these modern times. I teach my athletes important lessons that can and will be applicable to their lives,” he said.
Barnaby is currently working on his accreditation as a volunteer with the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation, and is hoping to undertake projects relating to sea pollution and the creation of and protection of fishing sanctuaries. “I also intend to undertake a Go Green with Thirteen Project, where 1,300 trees will be planted among 13 countries within the region,” he said.
He has also partnered with Terika Thomas, a teacher at the Boscobel Primary School, to participate in a project through the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change to engage and promote environmental issues in schools.
For his efforts in community and nation building, Barnaby received the Prime Minister’s Youth Award for Nation Building in 2018, and was recognised as a Sagicor Community Hero in 2020. He has also been recommended for appointment as a justice of the peace.