DECS's Second Chance Lessons Initiative Empowers Clients of the One Family Programme with Education and Vocational Training

The Sandy Lane Charitable Trust, the One Family Programme, and the Drug Education Counselling Services (DECS) have forged a partnership to transform lives through education and empowerment.

At the heart of this collaboration is DECS’s Second Chance Lessons initiative, which offers academic and vocational training for those seeking a fresh start. This would allow clients of the One Family Programme to benefit from classes.

The announcement was made on Saturday during the renaming of the computer lab at DECS’s Roebuck Street location in honour of the late Julian Sacher of the Sandy Lane Charitable Trust.

Despite its compact size, the DECS office is fully optimised to support learning, with over 2,000 individuals having passed through the programme last year.

Chairman Roger Husbands explained, “Most of these young people would have dropped out of school, would have left school without any education, and the reason why this was invented was the fact that we realised that we need to give young people a second chance to have skills so that they can go out and be their own entrepreneurs.”

Minister of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs Kirk Humphrey said they were starting off with 319 clients.

“We have 141 who would be doing CXCs, and that is a nine-month course. We have 149 who will be doing a skills programme [for] about three months, and then we have 29 who will be pursuing remedial courses that will be about six months, and that would allow our clients then to have the capacity to make a vital contribution to Barbados; that is all we want at the end of the day.”

Humphrey said Barbados owes a debt of gratitude to the charitable trust, adding, “Some of us have a life that we have inherited based on the circumstances of our birth, but there is the opportunity to change that by taking persons to see something else to give them a second chance, a second life essentially.” He added, “If we can have this programme replicated over Barbados, what a difference we are going to make.”

Phillipa Challis of the Sandy Lane Charitable Trust emphasised the need for empowerment.

“The reality is we are teaching people to fish. We are not just giving them fish like the welfare department. We need to teach them to fish themselves; we need to teach families and the parents in those families to be able to provide for their children, and that is the education pillar,” she said. (STT)