PIOJ Promotes Use of Best Practices for Community Development

The Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) is pursuing two main strategies to highlight and promote the use of best practices for community development.

Speaking at the seventh staging of the Symposium on Best Practices for Social and Community Development on Wednesday, November 2 at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel, the agency’s Director General, Dr. Wayne Henry, said that this is being done in an effort to restore volatile and vulnerable community spaces.

To this end, the PIOJ is calling all community development stakeholders to focus on social and community interventions and investments that have worked in the past and to see how they can be replicated for maximum impact going forward.

The PIOJ is also embracing the development of an electronic platform where best practices can be stored and retrieved as needed.

“This is an involved process that includes the development and agreement on the definition of terminology, agreement on what should be regarded as a best practice, ongoing dialogue among stakeholders with a view of unearthing and documenting best practices that should be highlighted across all collaborating entities, whether government or non-government,” Dr. Henry said.

“It is our hope that community development practitioners will replicate these practices to achieve the desired outcome of renewing underserved community spaces,” he added.

Dr. Henry said that fulfilling this renewal will bring the country closer to achieving the national vision statement, ‘Jamaica, the place of choice to live, work, raise families and do business’.

“To achieve this vision, it will require us coming together and having frank, but respectful discussions through which we identify challenges and impediments and ensure action that will enable us to overcome these obstacles,” he added.

Dr. Henry took the opportunity to remind participants to “be mindful of the existing coordinating mechanisms around which we should coalesce”.

These mechanisms include the Citizen Security Plan (CSP); the Community Renewal Programme, which provides support to the CSP in coordinating activities within community spaces; and the Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF), which is coordinating interventions among the Zones of Special Operations communities.

Each year, the PIOJ, through its Community Renewal Programme (CRP), partners with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Ministry of National Security (MNS), JSIF and the Social Development Commission (SDC), to highlight best practices in community development.

This year’s symposium was held under the theme ‘Towards Community Renewal – Coherence in Coordination’.