Lend Your Hand to Educating Jamaica's Children

This initiative involves distributing materials (for educational and creative learning and expression), as well as using interpersonal communication to teach young people about writing and inspire them to use their voices through that medium.

First, this organisation works to support disadvantaged youth in Jamaica by providing them with the concrete educational tools they need to communicate and to learn in creative, colourful, captivating ways. Specifically, Lend Your Hand to EJC supports disadvantaged youth and schools by sending paper, pencils, books, crayons and other supplies and equipment in an effort to help make education for children more engaging, and to facilitate artistic and literary modes of communication. Donations are the primary source of these materials.

Second, the organisation also visits disadvantaged schools and youth foundations - not only to provide these supplies, but also to enable young people to talk one-on-one to several well-known authors who have joined together with Lend Your Hand. The strategy here involves using interpersonal interaction to help children make a connection between the books they read and their own lives, in the process hopefully increasing their knowledge of literary arts and raising their motivation to learn about writing (and possibly pursue it as a career).

Education.

California (USA)-based author and poet Terry A. O'Neal strives to promote literacy to youth worldwide, is an advocate for youth literacy development, and is also the publisher of the youth poetry anthology Make Some Noise! - a yearly publication that gives young people the opportunity to tell the world what's on their minds by expressing themselves through poetry. O'Neal's goal in launching Lend Your Hand is to create "a balance in school systems with economic disparity by bridging the gap of awareness in children who are not prioritized due to environmental deficiencies, social discourse, political disharmony and domestic dysfunction."

Reflecting on O'Neal's visit to Granville All-Age School and Chetwood Memorial Primary School in Jamaica, Lend Your Hand notes that "Nothing is taken for granted on the island of Jamaica - all is used to its core. The excitement of the children was overwhelming and deeply touching as they scrambled to be near her as she walked and talked in the classrooms. Some of them had never seen an author and dared not think that they, too, could write a book."