By Lila Jones | Project Associate
A Space Journey in Jamaica
Great news! We found Space! We are breathing a sigh of relief. Our Scholarship Recipients continue to thrive in high school and are excited about the Learning Center.
Sometimes it pays to take a second look and re-evaluate the purpose. For the past year, our CEF team has been trying to find a good space in the right location that will work well for the Learning & Technology Center in Kingston, Jamaica.
Because our Scholarship Recipients attend different high schools at various locations throughout Kingston and St. Andrew, we tried to find a space that was more central so that our students would converge in the middle at our Learning Center when their schools let out. It would have been much easier to locate space in a particular inner-city neighborhood, but such a location would have denied easy access to most of our students, and there were major security concerns. Therefore, we concluded that the centrally located areas of Half-Way Tree or Cross Roads would work best. Unfortunately, the properties we viewed in those central locations were very expensive and unaffordable for us. And the properties that were reasonably priced for our charity to afford were broom closets!
Frustrated, we started to look outside of the central locations. One of the spaces we viewed is located in downtown Kingston. Physically, the building with some improvements would work well for the Center and it was spacious and in a charitable price range. However, we did not envision going all the way to downtown Kingston, nor did we want to. We thought it wasn’t very central and we had some security concerns, and it is surrounded by depressed communities.
Several months later, after viewing additional spaces in exhaustion, we re-visited the downtown Kingston building. One of the things we noticed is that although it is downtown, it would be easily accessible to most of our students, because many buses go there. Importantly, there are several other schools around that area, where those students are also in desperate need of access to technology, not only our scholarship recipients. It was settled. We walked in the space a few days ago, and knew we had found our new Center home!
By creating the Learning & Technology Center downtown Kingston, CEF will now reach an additional population of disadvantaged children who really need this support! We are excited! As our team work on the new space, we will be sending you photos and updates on the progress.
March 18th is 30% Bonus Day on Global Giving!
GlobalGiving's first matching opportunity of 2015 is Wednesday, March 18th! They are offering a 30% match on all donations up to $1,000 per donor per project, while funds remain. There is $60,000 available in matching and matching begins at 9:00 EDT and lasts until funds run out or 23:59:59 EDT. There is also $2,000 in bonus prizes available!
Please help us and donate to CEF Learning & Technology Center on March 18th, so that we can raise needed funds through this great matching opportunity! Please donate early, as the matching funds go quickly and we need all the help we can get to make our Learning & Technology Center an excellent one.
Thank you for your continued support! You are making the education of brilliant poor children possible.
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