What a Leadership Training Center in Jamaica Would Change

It is a fair challenge. The money that would go into a permanent facility could buy an enormous number of textbooks, and textbooks help immediately. Here is the case for the building anyway.

Supplies solve a recurring problem recurrently. Every year the same students need the same things, and every year the intervention ends when the materials run out. That is worth doing and we will keep doing it. It does not accumulate.

A permanent place changes three things that a supply programme structurally cannot.

It survives the end of the school year. The gap that ends most young people's progress is not during school, it is after, when there is nowhere to go and no adult attached to them any more. A facility that is open in August and still open the following August is the only version of this work that covers that gap.

It allows staff rather than volunteers. Volunteers are the backbone of everything JEPF does and they are also, by definition, available at irregular intervals. Continuity of relationship is the active ingredient in mentoring, and paying someone to be there next Tuesday is how you get it reliably.

It gives young people somewhere to be that is theirs. This sounds soft and is not. A place where a young person is known, expected, and has a role is a strong predictor of whether they keep going, and it is very difficult to manufacture without walls.

The honest status: the center has not been built. No site has been announced, no construction has started, and no opening date has been set. We are raising the money through events, sponsorships, the supporter directory and donations. When any of that changes it will be published here rather than implied.