Jamaican Wins Commonwealth Youth Award

Shamoy Hajare, from Jamaica, has won this year’s Commonwealth Youth Award for the Caribbean/Canada region. The presentation was made recently at Marlborough House, in London.

Shamoy is the founder and President of Jamaica School for Social Entrepreneurship (JSSE), a hub for social enterprise development, which promotes the concept of learning by doing.

The JSSE currently assists individuals and community based organizations to develop social enterprise models for their social and environmental missions through training, mentoring, coaching and consultations.

Since 2014, the JSSE has trained and supported 89 young people and  27 youth-led organizations in Jamaica, through its Building Resilient Youth Clubs (BRYC) programme and other social enterprise workshops. The organization also has an engineering unit, which designs and develops systems to promote sustainable agriculture and environmental sustainability.

In 2016, the organization will also be launching the Young Changemakers Summer Camp and the Think Big, Start Lean Fellowship Programme for aspiring social entrepreneurs. Shamoy also co-founded the Youth Entrepreneurship Project (YEP) while serving as project coordinator at Young Women and Men of Purpose (YWOP/YMOP).

The project trained 44 aspiring young entrepreneurs and awarded 14 with seed funding to launch their businesses. Since the first cycle of the project, 20 participants launched their businesses and 10 jobs have been indirectly created as a result.

Shamoy is also a member of the Jamaica Association of Social Workers (JASW), a UNESCO youth advisor, a volunteer at YWOP/YMOP, a Nexus Caribbean Organizer, UNFPA Youth Advisor and a district coordinator for the Caribbean Youth Environment Network in Jamaica.