Norma Fenton is one of our 2014-2015 Fellows Program grant recipient, working with Amizade in Jamaica. Petersfield is a rural town in the southwestern part of Jamaica, and like many Jamaican towns, is dependent on a sugar cane industry that has brought insufficient revenue into the community for years. In 1988, residents of Petersfield founded The Association of Clubs (AOC) in the hopes of addressing rural poverty issues by empowering the community to take real action. Amizade and AOC have enjoyed more than ten years of partnership working together to offer opportunities to the community through service learning trips. Due to aging of the AOC’s founder, in order to strengthen and sustain their mutually beneficial programs, new leadership needs to be developed. The AllPeopleBeHappy Fellows grant is being used to hire Norma Felton as a full time Program Assistant. Her goals are to stabilize and solidify AOC’s community development work, expand community initiatives through the involvement of the host family communities in Petersfield and Galloway, develop the capacity for a full time Amizade Site Director in Jamaica. As 2014 came to a close, AOC began planning a project to align with the Ministry of Agriculture’s “Grow what you eat, Eat what you grow” food security effort. They have secured permission to cultivate a plot of fallow land adjacent to a local school.
Blog #43: Norma Fenton
0