The Young Women’s Christain Association (YWCA) is making a plea to corporate Barbados and interested individuals to partner with the organisation.
During a community Christmas party held at the organisation’s Deacons Road, St Michael, headquarters on Saturday, president Kerrilyn Harding told Barbados TODAY that the YWCA was in need of financial assistance and voluntary service to help the association reach more disadvantaged children and women.
She said the non-governmental organisation was operating with limited volunteers and the main sponsor for its outreach initiatives such as its breakfast and homework programmes was the Maria Holder Memorial Trust.
“We need some support. We need people to volunteer their time. We also need financial support, because we need to make sure that our house is in order. We have to make sure that we pay staff, admin staff, maintenance staff, and we want to make sure that certain things that are broken in the building are fixed so that we can serve the community to our fullest capacity,” she said.
“We need volunteers for our breakfast club and we need volunteers for our homework hub. This is something that we’ll be starting next year, which is geared toward primary school and secondary school children to keep their minds engaged to make sure that they don’t get into any trouble, any mischief or anything like that. So, we definitely need volunteers for that because it’s something new that we’ll be launching and we also need volunteers for our reading club.”
As it relates to monetary support, Harding said the organisation needs help restoring its headquarters.
She said the facility needs new windows, the car park needs to be repaved and the gate has to be fixed.
She added that monetary donations would also help with facilitating the programmes and make sure that the resources needed to execute them are readily available to the hundreds of children who benefit from them.
During the Christmas programme scores of children were entertained with a variety of food and drinks, face painting and a jumping tent.
They also got the opportunity to sit on Santa’s lap and receive an early Christmas gift.
Close to 100 children were in attendance.
Harding said this event was significant because “we just recognise that COVID-19 has left a lot of families in some unfortunate circumstances and we just wanted to bring joy to children”. (SZB)
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