Despite the poor turnout at a community forum in Linden the organizers are satisfied that they have achieved their objectives to a great degree and a youth forum to be held soon is one of the developments in an ongoing programme.
The mission of the activity was to facilitate dialogue and community participation in the development of Linden at three levels – the Linden Forum, the Linden Media Forum and the Linden Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) forum.
Samuel Wright, head of the Linden Fund Trust, said that while all the presentations were excellently done he was particularly impressed by the output from the department of education which came from the senior education officer in the Region 10 department of education.
Wright said that for the first time several of the participants were exposed to the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the structures in the education sector and would have gained a better appreciation of the challenges and the importance of collaboration with other key stakeholders.
The forum sought to have all the various stakeholders in the community on a level playing field to share ideas, highlight challenges and work on possible solutions in the hope of raising performance levels. “If we go at the Town Council they are in charge, if we go to the Region there are in charge, but at the community forum we are all equal,” Wright noted.
Following the many presentations it was widely appreciated that there is need for greater attention to the development of youths in the Linden community. And the focus on youths formed a main part of each presentation and this, he said, has resulted in the organization planning a youth forum to be held soon.
Wright said further that another idea that came out of the forum is the need to make their secondary schools environmentally friendly. It was considered that environmental issues should be of greater concern at school while school buildings should be designed to take account of environmental factors.
“We’ll probably approach the Low Carbon Development Strategy (unit) to get some funding for this to make Linden the pilot project for this.”
This development, he said, would aid tremendously in developing a group of people with some sense of responsibility for the environment.
Meanwhile, the Linden Forum has proposed a quarterly one-day activity to address one or more critical developmental issues with presentations by a stakeholder agency and resource persons followed by
panel discussions and guidelines for the way forward.
The Linden Media Forum is proposed as a monthly activity for announcements and presentations and discussions on important current issues.
