My Island My Community Project

Participants at MIMC Workshop, Bay Garden's Hotel, St. Lucia

From 26 April to 7 May 2010 the Speyside Eco Marine Park Rangers, the Buccoo Reef Trust and the GEF/SGP are participating in the intensive training workshop for the My Island My Community project.  The Coastal and Marine Management and Education in the South Eastern Caribbean project is supporting the participation of coalition members in this two week exercise.

My Island – My Community is a partnership of Media Impact, the Secretariat of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), GEF Small Grants Programme, implemented by UNDP (GEF SGP), Global Island Partnership (GLISPA), the Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD), BirdLife International, Durrell, SeaWeb and the St Lucia Folk Research Center.  There are also 30 partners throughout the Caribbean.

The project will have three tracks – Track 1: regional radio soap opera (all countries will be getting the same soap opera to be aired on their respective radio stations) that will be aired twice a week over the course of the project.  The content will be vetted by the country coalitions.  Track 2: a radio magazine programme that can either run concurrently with the airing of the episodes or separately.  Track 3: a community campaign that will be country specific and be designed by country coalition. This is where countries can be creative in how they get the messages out.

The Tobago coalition is being led by the Speyside Eco-Marine Park Rangers with support from the Buccoo Reef Trust. Other members of the coalition are to be determined but Radio Tambrin is already on board.  Funding to support the Tobago Coalition is coming from the Trinidad and Tobago GEF Small Grants Programme out of the UNDP.  

At the opening ceremony, Alleyne Regis welcomed the participants and opened the proceedings with a word of prayer.  The OECS is a prime partner of this initiative and Mr. Keith Nichols (Head, Environment and Sustainable Development Unit) brought greetings to the participants. He congratulated Alleyne and his team for the sterling work they’ve done so far.  OECS has had a longstanding relationship with Alleyne and a studio exists in the OECS office that will be used to air some of the work produced from this workshop/project.  He shared the philosophy of island systems management which describes the nature of the small islands which see the land and marine environments being linked.  He presented three examples: Anguilla hotel built on a sand dune that lost its foundation after a hurricane; a St. Lucia two-day workshop that exposed farmers and fishermen to a terrestrial and marine environment and asked them to observe and describe what happened; while following a garbage truck on its way to landfill one day a KFC box was thrown out of the window unto the verge; it was a stark reminder of the need to educate the population about the impact of their actions.  Sustainability needs to be built into our activities as we move forward.  This project will help to form such a foundation that will allow us to help create and maintain those island system management linkages.  Lynne Yennakis is a relatively new board member to PCI Media (5 yrs) and is looking forward to a bright future with all the partnerships that are created. PCI Media is about building capacity with the groups they work with. She spoke of the impact of radio soap operas in her time as a child when TV didn’t exist. She indicated that you never know where the power of the soap opera would lead a listener.