Crowdfunding to help finance $2b community reform project

The private-sector-driven social transformation and community renewal project launched on Monday will shortly tap the Jamaica Social Stock Exchange to raise $650 million over the next five years.

The $2-billion Project STAR initiative targeting 10-20 under-resourced communities will be funded through mixed financing, with the first being corporate funding to the tune of $350 million over the life of the project.

The social stock exchange listing is in between October or November.

“There will be a crowdfunding approach to the diaspora and we will not only be engaging the diaspora for funding but bringing them on to see how they can offer support in terms of skills,” said Keith Duncan, co-chair of Project STAR, in a Gleaner interview on Monday.

“Later down in the project, we will also be looking at multilateral funding.”

The project will target Rose Gardens, Parade Gardens, and Tel-Aviv in central Kingston, and Bucknor and Effortville in Clarendon. About 12 communities in Savanna-la-Mar are on Project STAR’s radar.

Social intervention projects have been a hit and miss in tackling Jamaica’s chronic crime crisis and social malaise that cripples poor urban and rural neighbourhoods. Deputy Prime Minister Dr Horace Chang has been a persistent critic of some social reform programmes, suggesting that they have not delivered on their promise.

But Duncan believes that Project STAR will provide “real and effective transformation” that will have a ripple effect nationally.

The partnership with the Jamaica Constabulary Force will have a strong economic imperative, said Duncan, who is also president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ).

“Complementary to social programmes and interventions, there needs to be an economic transformation component. That will give them a pathway to achieve their objective at the level of the individual with a job or a business or at the level of the community in terms of increased economic activity,” said Duncan.

Social development veteran Saffrey Brown told The Gleaner that Project STAR will seek to secure the buy-in of community members.

The design of solutions will be heavily influenced by the needs in the specific communities and the root causes of problems.

Brown explained that communities were identified for intervention using a data-driven methodology, which included population, crime, and violence data.

Three years of data on major crimes and violence-related injuries (VRI) drawn from hospital surveillance systems were examined to rank all communities in Jamaica.

Points of interest, population smaller than 15,000, and more than 150 incidents of crime and violence were among the other criteria applied in order to exclude commercial hubs.

Project STAR will first venture into the eastern arc of downtown Kingston in September, followed by Savanna-la-Mar, and then May Pen proper.

Downtown’s eastern sector, which incorporates much of central Kingston, was ranked fifth for crime and 39th on the VRI rank, while Savanna-la-Mar was ranked 24th and fifth for crime and VRI, respectively.

“We’re not just looking at crime, we’re also looking at violence. You may find that communities are ranked higher in terms of violence and not so much in terms of crime, but we want to address the issues of violence in communities,” Brown said.

She added that youth will be the centre of Project STAR’s transformation approach and youth-related matters will be integrated within the design.

Brown shared that $2 billion is a little below the average amount that is usually spent on interventions of this size.

“We believe that we’re gonna be able to leverage a huge amount of additional resources. People, communities and businesses are ready to get involved and that’s what it will take to deliver the programmes in the communities. At the end of it, we will find that as a nation we would’ve made a greater contribution than just the $2 billion,” said the social development veteran.

Further, she said that the pilot will be conducted in the first 10 communities and may expand its footprint if additional funding is provided.

The Violence Prevention Alliance, Project Alpha, and the Council for Voluntary Social Services are key collaborators of the initiative.

In addition to having a robust learning framework guided by Dr Nadiya Figueroa, Brown said Project STAR will benefit from the PSOJ leveraging its management expertise and resources.

Throughout the project, there will be phase and mid-year reviews and opportunities for the public to participate in discussions about the approaches being taken.

“We want to break down the idea of social transformation being this complicated thing to everybody, recognising that social transformation is very simple – supporting a school, volunteering in your community, or providing a free ride for children to get to school – so that everyone understands the part that they can play,” Brown said.

judana.murphy@gleanerjm.com