Meet Jamaica’s modern-day heroes. Read their stories. See why they are this year’s RJRGLEANER Honour Awardees.
PSOJ COVID-19 Response Fund opens arms to needy
OPERATIONS MANAGER of the PSOJ COVID-19 Jamaica Response Fund, Saffrey Brown, is proud that the initiative exceeded its deliverables and set a new watermark for disaster relief, providing food packages, meals, personal protection equipment, and other items over four months at two-week intervals.
The PSOJ COVID-19 Jamaica Response Fund, recipient of the 2020 RJRGLEANER Honour Award for Voluntary Service, mobilised $200 million in resources from the private sector, $131 million in cash and the rest in kind.
All told, 73,000 long-duration food packages, 10,000 cooked meals, and 60,000 masks were delivered.
The collaboration provided well-needed relief to more than 93,000 Jamaicans in more than 60 communities, networking with over 60 non-governmental organisations to make it happen.
Brown described the network as the most exciting project undertaken in her 25 years of working in development.
She was particularly pleased that there was not even a whisper of partisanship in how the beneficiaries were selected.
“All the usual ‘politricking’ didn’t exist here. It was immediately down to business. It was a recognition that so many of our people are going to get hit hard pretty soon and we needed to get out to them because businesses were closed,” Brown said.
Forging the partnership between diverse entities, including the Jamaica Defence Force, Jamaica Constabulary Force, Council for Voluntary Social Services (CVSS), the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, and the Social Development Commission, was not going to be easy. But as Brown explained, another of their partners, the Mona GeoInfomatics Institute (MGI), took all the guesswork out of the equation.
KEY ROLES IN THE PROCESS
MGI played a pivotal role i n the mapping of a vulnerability index to ensure that limited resources were channelled to target populations. That was key to making sure that the response fund’s cash stretched as far as possible. PricewaterhouseCoopers also came on board and volunteered to do the financial modelling.
For about six months, there was a constant flow of information on how funds were raised, how beneficiaries were selected, and performance updates. Brown described it as the best example of a multisectoral partnership.
“You had a really strong team that believed in certain things – transparency and accountability. We believed i n reporting constantly to our donors and to our communities, and that transparent system of letting everybody know how the communities were selected,” said the operations manager of the response fund.
Aligning the right partners at the right linkage points was crucial to the success of the philanthropic effort.
The PSOJ focused on its strengths: knowing how to mobilise resources. CVSS leveraged its influence in organising and distribution of relief. The Jamaica Defence Force is the master of logistics, and the constabulary has wide reach with its more than 11,000 members.
“The JDF ... took control of the 50,000-square-foot warehouse which was provide free of cost by Derrick Cotterell of Sampars for the duration of the campaign, and every grain of sugar that went out was accounted for,” said Brown.
However, the beneficiaries of the fund were not the only ones who found the initiative rewarding, as it provided an avenue for many individuals and agencies to de-stress.
With the island at a standstill because of curfews dating back to April 2020, voluntarism gave team members a call to duty.
“It felt like day after day was a public holiday, where everybody was home, nobody was on the street, and it felt like you had lost any control over your life,” Brown recalled.
“Companies weren’t quite sure how to manoeuvre and, personally, we weren’t sure what to do with ourselves, and what this fund allowed was for to have some sense of being in control of something; that COVID didn’t control us, that we could still be sort of purposeful in terms of what we were doing during those early weeks.”
‘All the usual ‘politricking’ didn’t exist here. It was immediately down to business. It was a recognition that so many of our people are going to get hit hard pretty soon and we needed to get out to them because businesses were closed.’