Youth Leadership Development in Jamaica

Leadership curricula travel badly. A programme built for students who already have stable housing, reliable transport and parents who will chase the school makes assumptions that do not hold, and young people notice immediately when a programme is describing someone else's life.

Designing it for Jamaican students changes a few things.

Start with what the young people already run. Many of them are already carrying real responsibility at home, often for siblings, often without being thanked for it. A programme that treats them as blank slates wastes the strongest material available. A programme that names what they are already doing as leadership, and then builds on it, starts from a position of credibility.

Be honest about constraints rather than motivational about them. Telling a student that anything is possible with enough effort is both untrue and insulting to someone who can see the obstacles clearly. Telling them which specific obstacles can be worked around, and how, is useful and earns trust.

Point the work at the community rather than at individual escape. Programming framed around getting out produces a small number of people who leave and a larger number who conclude it was not for them. Programming framed around running something where you are has a lower ceiling per person and a much higher floor.

Use people who are from there. JEPF is run by members of the Jamaican diaspora, and that matters less as inspiration than as calibration. They know which advice applies and which is imported nonsense.

This is the programming the leadership training center is intended to house permanently. It has not been built. We are raising the money for it, and until it exists the work runs at smaller scale alongside the supplies and scholarships.