An early morning breakfast meeting that Chairman of Gore Developments Limited (GDL), Phillip Gore, attended in 2018, quickly evolved into the Phillip and Christine Gore Family Foundation (“Gore Family Foundation”) taking fifty at-risk youth under their wings. Overnight, Mrs. Christine Gore became a mother-figure to fifty youth who had, up until that point in their lives, fallen through the cracks of our society. These were youth in jeopardy of joining gangs, or going to jail for murder, but who were also equally capable of becoming productive members of society as valued workmen on GDL construction sites or joining our military. We know this to be true because these are real examples of the trajectories of the lives of the youth under the Gore Family Foundation’s purview in the Housing, Opportunity, Production and Employment (HOPE) Programme.
The HEART/National Service Training Agency Trust (“HEART/NTA”) HOPE Programme is a training and apprenticeship Programme that aims to transform unattached youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four years old into “fully rounded individuals” who are able to become “productive members of society.” Firmly believing in this mission, the Gore Family Foundation partnered with HEART/NTA on June 1, 2018, contributing six million dollars towards helping with the development of youth from troubled communities in St. James and St. Catherine.
Upon partnering with HEART/NTA, Mrs. Christine Gore immediately brought these fifty youth into her orbit. She interviewed each intern personally, kept in touch with all fifty interns involved in the Programme on WhatsApp (and still does with a number of them to this day), attended the HEART/NTA sites, and became intimately familiar with the courses taught as part of the Programme’s curriculum. Mrs. Gore’s hands-on involvement brought with it a level of accountability that was unexpected, and that ultimately brought to light the limitations of the Programme. She hopes that her concerns will now be heard, and addressed, particularly given the recent Auditor General’s Report that highlighted HEART/NTA’s inability to accomplish its goals in terms of rates of certification to expenditure over the past five years.
The Gore Family Foundation felt compelled to take responsibility for the training of students involved in the Programme although this was not part of their initial partnership agreement with HEART/NTA. As part of this training, the Gore Family Foundation: repaired HEART/NTA’s computers on-site with the intention of beginning online classes for students; converted model units on GDL sites into classrooms; and employed coordinators responsible for liaising with the HEART/NTA and providing meaningful learning experiences to students in the Programme.
In writing this article, we conducted a number of interviews with the interns involved in this Programme. A standout intern who took courses in Alternative Dispute Resolution, English Grammar, masonry, carpentry, and plumbing, mentioned that this was the “one Programme that [he had] ever learned from.” He gives thanks for the skills that he developed as part of the Programme, and is certain that these skills are the only reason that he has been able to find work in these trying times. A number of other interns also expressed similar sentiments, and are currently working in fields related to the courses that they studied while involved in the Programme. Many interns however are also currently out of work, have turned to a life of crime, or are back to where they started before the Programme.
It is apparent to the Gore Family Foundation from its involvement in this Programme that some of the youth targeted will be able to be helped and some won’t, despite the best efforts of all involved. However, all of these youth deserve to have those who say that they care, and who are tasked with the responsibility of trying to fight this uphill battle, give this fight all that they have. This, more than anything, is where the Programme fell short. The Programme must now take a hard look at itself in the mirror, assess why it has not been as effective as it can be and it needs to be in giving at-risk youth adequate opportunities, and make the changes necessary to address these issues. The Gore Family Foundation stands ready to offer support in these efforts as we hopefully move towards giving this Programme (and its participants) a real chance to achieve its true potential. As Mrs. Christine Gore recently mentioned in an interview with the Observer, “notwithstanding the challenges that we faced, our commitment to Jamaica does not allow us to ignore the problem of at-risk youth, and whilst we focus on the prevention of this result in our work, we are mindful of the 210,000 youth in this group who desperately need our help.”