BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – A minimum of 140 at-risk youth will receive an opportunity to not only improve their sporting skills following last week’s introduction of the A Ganar programme to St. Kitts-Nevis, but will receive life skills that can improve their employability.
From March 16-17 at Warner Park international instructors Brooke Rosenbauer from Partners of the Americas and Santiago Andrade, President of A Ganar Ecuador, worked with representatives from three local groups on the six core skills of youth programme’s first Phase.
According to participant Victoria Baucom, founder of the Community Achiever’s Project (CAP), the lessons she learned during the seminar quickly proved in her mind that they would be effective at reaching youths age 16-24, which is A Ganar’s target audience.
“From our own experience this morning and yesterday, I can see how it can be effective because even we as adults have come in with our own directions scattered, but under their training they showed us how to focus.
“The same methods that they used on us in the classroom for these few days of training, I’m pretty convinced that it would be equally effective in bringing in at-risk youth. I’m pretty certain that these type of modules they have designed for us are going to be effective at least 90 percent of the time,” she told SKNVibes.
During the Phase I training, the facilitators participated in both classroom and sports training, where A Ganar’s six core skills of teamwork, communication, discipline, respect, a focus on results and continual self-improvement were reinforced.
Baucom said that even though she was focused on learning the training methods that would be used to pass the skills on later, she also found that the participating adults learned to look at themselves in a new way.
“It is good that we are doing it first because we often tell our children to do as I say, not as I do. So, now we are actually the ones that are going to have to be learning some of these life skills ourselves. We as adults lack a lot of these same skills. By us learning them, it is going to be more convincing to the children.”
Apart from CAP, which reaches out to youths through agriculture and agro-processing, the first Phase of A Ganar was attended by representatives from the Caribbean Healthy Lifestyles Programme and the St. Kitts-Nevis Football Association.
St. Kitts Coordinator for A Ganar Udora Farrell said that the participants are now expected to pass their knowledge onto the nation’s youth through programmes designed specifically for them.
“What these facilitators are now expected to do is to train participants, the people aged 16-24, on the core skills. The training can last anything from six weeks for Phase I up to three or four months if it’s absolutely essential. The key thing is to get the message across and the skills firmly planted in their heads,” she said.
Farrell indicated that complimentary courses such as conflict resolution would be carried out in addition to the core skills and the ultimate goal of the A Ganar programme is to have the youth either become employed, start an entrepreneurial venture or pursue higher education.
The first youths are expected to enter the programme sometime next month, and while a great deal of work remains ahead to achieve all four Phases of the A Ganar programme, Farrell said that A Ganar’s 70% success rate in youth obtaining gainful employment or returning to school is a very positive sign for the future of the nation’s youth.
“The goal is to ultimately have this programme available to every 15 or 16-year-old whilst in school so when they choose to come to the workplace they have the basic skills already,” she stated.
A call for sponsorship was made, particularly for the 140 or more A Ganar T-shirts and instruction manuals that would be needed for the programme’s success.
Special thanks was given to the USAID by Farrell for their support of A Ganar, while Baucom was grateful for continued support from Basseterre High School Principal Earleen Bloice Roberts, teachers Randolph Franklin and Wilbert Blackett, Sydney Berkley and Maaisha Liburd for their continued dedication through CAP and now A Ganar to the nation’s many at-risk youth.
