Newsletter for February, 2019
Upcoming events
We Inspire ~ Think Differently Vision Board Party
Theme:   Making Strategic Moves in 2019
Venue:  The Fig Tree Restaurant, Belmont Walkway 
Date:  Sunday, February 24th
Time:   3pm

This, our second We Inspire seminar, aims to help youth to think strategically about their lives. This seminar will use simple yet realistic tools such as the vision board, daily planner, and the resume/CV to articulate their personal and professional experience and goals. Our youth need to be able to present themselves as products of our society, marketing themselves as assets and drivers of change. This is what this second seminar hopes to achieve. For further information, or to book a space, contact Rekha Gooding .
6th Annual Bequia Mission/Grenadines Initiative Gala Benefit
Sunday, March 10, 2019, at the Frangipani in Bequia . Reception begins at 5:30.
This signature annual event is mounted in support of ongoing education and medical programs on Bequia and St. Vincent. Ticket includes dinner, live entertainment, dancing, silent auction, and a live auction. Auction items include resort and villa stays, boat trips, art, jewelry, and much more.

Tickets are available now in Bequia at Solana’s Boutique in the Harbour, and the Grenadine Villas office on the Belmont Walkway. Tickets are ECD $150, with the proceeds going directly toward programs on Bequia and St Vincent.
All are welcome. We hope to see you there.
Benefit to support We Choose
We're proud to announce that the proceeds from this year's benefit support We Choose. We Choose is a strategy developed by Nicolle Trudeau, with support from Marion Hous e , Community Foundation for St. Vincent and the Grenadines , a nd the Grenadines Partnership Fund , to address rising rates of sexual and gender violence within the Grenadines. It includes classes, workshops, and outreach programs aimed raising awareness of the issues, how they present within the various island communities, and proactive prevention strategies. 

“Don't Trouble We”
This is a dual-gender educational curriculum for school-aged children designed to promote respect for themselves and others. The curriculum was developed to be culturally relevant, culturally sensitive, and age appropriate for presentation within small Caribbean island communities. It includes actions and activities to improve self-awareness and resilience delivered through six weekly, one-hour sessions.

"We Together"
Female family members participate in classes that focus on communication and personal empowerment. The aim is to improve personal safety and to provide basic verbal and physical techniques that serve to improve the quality of females' lives.  

“We Protect”
Adult male participants attend a 3-day training course around effective male leadership, a healthy sense of masculinity, and the creation of an expanded a community network of leadership and social protection. The aim is to expose males to situations where they can improve the safety of everyone in the community, particularly in settings and behaviours that can lead to sexual violence. 
 
What we like about We Choose
It’s not an easy topic to discuss, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be discussed. Sexual violence is a symptom of something greater than the violence itself, even as catastrophic as it can be. It’s symptomatic of how boys and girls, men and women see themselves and the places that they feel they are meant to occupy within the community. As such, it affects the entire community, not just those directly involved in specific instances of violence.

The curricula that Trudeau has developed approaches the problem of sexual violence at that very fundamental level, starting when kids are young, and getting them to think about who they are, how they can interact with others empathetically, and then growing their awareness of some of the subtle ways that they may impede on the freedom and empowerment of others. The approach is not one intended, for example, only to train intervention techniques. Rather, it’s an approach that starts years ahead, building skills, awareness, and practices that will ensure those acts don’t happen, and that the patterns that inform power imbalances are disrupted.
                 
We also like that it’s a program that is built here, based on real knowledge of this community, and which will live here, with trainers coming forward from the community to deliver the curriculum and, in turn, train further trainers. As such, it’s a program that will have a life well beyond any one person, and will be sustainable over a longer period of time than a single leadership term. We also see it as something that is foundational to the other aspects of the work of the Grenadines Initiative, namely empowerment and the promotions of an ethos of achievement. We’re proud to have this opportunity to support the concepts advanced within the We Choose program. 

For more information about the programs and the research that has informed their development, visit WeChooseSVG.org
 
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Contact

In Canada:
Glen Herbert
289-439-7052


In St. Vincent and the Grenadines:
Rekha Gooding
1 784-497-6621