Some sixteen youths between the ages of 13 and 17 graduated from the USAID’s Basic Life Employability Skills (BLES) Programme.
A participant collecting her certificate of completion – Photo Credit: (MHSSS)
The programme is geared explicitly at empowering youths to be motivated, goal-oriented, and career-focused. The programme commenced in July and lasted for five weeks. The graduation was held at the Umana Yana on Thursday.
The youths were taught life skills, decision-making, problem-solving, communication, interpersonal skills, self-awareness, empathy, creative and critical thinking, assertiveness, self-control, and resilience.
Furthermore, to complete BLES’s community service development component, the participants – 10 females and six males – revitalized a flower garden, started a small kitchen garden with sweet peppers and painted some wooden louver windows at the Palms Geriatric Home on Brickdam.
For more than a decade, USAID has partnered with regional governments, local stakeholders, and private sector members intending to create a safer, more prosperous Caribbean. In that regard, they have placed a high priority on youth development.
BLES falls under the Family and Youth Resilience (CFYR) Project, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The programme uses community crime and violence prevention plans that strengthen data-driven observatories to conduct hotspot crime and violence mapping, adopt a public health approach to reducing violence, connect the community to the police and other service providers, to support at-risk youth, and build linkages with the private sector to support youth employment.
