They say it takes a village to raise a child, and one institution's new program is putting it to the test.
The Institute for Peace and Justice, offered by the Center for Leadership, Education and Training (C-LET), has for the last 10 months been making huge strides to better the young adult population on Eleuthera in their pilot program, which offers the troubled teens and pre-teens coping and socialization skills in a three-step program.
The Dean of C-LET, Dr. Reginald W. Eldon, says that this program ultimately offers them a positive alternative route in their lives to break the cycle of crime in the community.
For this reason, they decided to focus on a provision in the law that allows for alternative sentencing to first-time youth offenders at 11-13 years old and 14-18 years old.
"We wanted to start this alternative sentencing on a large scale so that we could get a lot of the Bahamian community involved in it," says Dr. Eldon.  "So we started our investigation, sending out people to see what was really happening in juvenile courts, speaking with the Department of Social Services in Eleuthera."
"We basically came up with the understanding that many of the cases are not major cases," he points out. "Some do not require a person going to the Simson Penn and Willie Mae Pratt Schools. But there doesn't seem to be an in-between place where we can reach the kids before they get from there to a hardened criminal."
The Center for Leadership, Education and Training was founded under the Methodist Church in 2008 to provide a place where local people would be encouraged to offer for the ministry through their School of Ministry for Diaconal Ministry Training.
At that time however, it became apparent with the rising crime rate hitting close to home in two murders in Eleuthera --that of Sylvia Cates and of Dr. Thaddeus McDonald, both advocates for youth programming--that the idea for an Institute for Peace and Justice came about.
"We were in a church council meeting the night we received news about McDonald's murder, and we closed our proceedings and said 'Ok, we now need to discuss this, we need to do something'," says Dr. Eldon.
Initially they wanted to establish a program for peace which would advocate and educate about nonviolence, yet it became apparent that sometimes the reason for there being no peace is the fact that there is no justice, so they set about looking at the justice system and found out about alternative sentencing.
Taking inspiration and guidance from tried-and-true international programs that aim to eradicate crime through providing meaningful alternative activities and coping mechanisms for young adults--such as AMI Kids (USA), ARISE (Florida, USA) and PACT (Toronto, Canada)--Eldon and his group of like-minded community members established one of C-LET's students, Colin Moss, to head the pilot program in The Recovery Centre in Governor's Harbour, Central Eleuthera.
"His job was to work with high school administrators and the Department of Social Services and the communities to try to avert and stop a kid who is in trouble from ending up in the courts," explains Dr. Eldon.
Ten months into the pilot Peace and Justice program in Central Eleuthera, they are finding that the program receives more recommendations from schools instead of courts, allowing them to get to the root of the problem even before serious crime manifests, which makes it a successful model for the rest of the islands.
"We are now looking at beginning our evaluation and assessment of that program and trying to see if we have a model we can now offer to the rest of the country, offer to cities of Nassau and Freeport and other islands, hopefully early next year," says Dr. Eldon.
In order to do that, however, they'll need to expand--large enough to take the program that was successful on a small-scale to the crime capital of The Bahamas, Nassau. For that reason, says Dr. Eldon, they are on the precipice of a new program to increase their base of mentors--the Community Coaching and Mentoring training course, which launches on October 28 in Eleuthera and will hopefully soon expand onto Nassau and other islands.
The idea behind it, says Dr. Eldon, is to get individuals from the entire community--teachers, parents, policemen, doctors, family members, everyone--to come together and learn some basic skills to assist in youth work with young people in communities.
He emphasizes despite being sponsored and organized by the Methodist Church, the Peace and Justice Institute is not a sectarian program--so individuals wishing to get involved simply need a desire to start to shape the community they wish to see and live in.
"You don't have to have a degree, you don't have to have a lot of money, you don't have to be a sanctified born-again Christian--you just have to be a human being who says I can help one or two," says Dr. Eldon.
"In most cases, young people would not get messed up if they had somebody who they knew they could trust, who is consistent, who cared about them and who offered some boundary of discipline."
From there, Dr. Eldon says they hope to inspire young adults to take an interest in activities that can provide creative self-employment and significant employment opportunities for them.
It is only through that, points out Dr. Eldon, that the cycle of crime is addressed at one of its root causes and The Bahamas can begin to move toward creating more positive and inspiring crime-free communities--even though he knows we have a long way to go.
"Someone asked me the other day if this would solve the crime problem. I said absolutely not. Will it help? Absolutely, it will," he says. "Will this be the only thing that will help? Absolutely not. But I am not prepared to sit down any longer and to just say crime is getting out of hand."
"Crime is going to destroy all of us if we don't try to find out what's going on, and we're not going to have a country left. But I don't believe we're too far gone yet to do something, I believe we can affect this."
For more information about The Center for Leadership, Education and Training, The Peace and Justice Institute and the Community Coaching and Mentoring training course, e-mail clet@bahamasmethodist.org.
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