This year's independence theme, "United in Love and Service" finds expression in the tree planting exercise of the citizen group We the People which is utilizing Emancipation Day 2011 to help foster community linking environmental awareness and active citizenship.

Since its inception We the People has worked on and towards various projects to improve our life in common. With its proposed resources and reach there is an extraordinary opportunity for the organization to be an agent of significant change and renewal while helping to unite the country around a shared goal.

That goal and ambition is to invite and help make possible, greater, more structured and more targeted opportunities for we the people to engage in community and national service.  It is a goal worthy of the ambitions of We the People as well as the urgent needs of the Bahamian people.

A place to begin may be found in four social intervention thrusts outlined in Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham's contribution to the 2011/12 budget debate. Those strategies, nonpartisan in nature, are geared towards youth development and crime prevention, specifically. Broadly, they concern community renewal.

TRANSFORMATIVE
The Prime Minister noted: "Principally, the social interventions in which we will invest are meant to provide young people with positive and transformative life experiences, with lessons drawn from effective programs with measurable results and success rates in various countries around the world including in North and South America as well as Australia and New Zealand."
He further advised: "Among the social intervention programs we are investing in and expanding are:
"Community service programs in all public schools with an enhanced service-learning, ethics and character development component; Community and youth development programmes geared towards providing young people positive and alternative life experiences and skills while preventing anti-social behavior; Effective and creative alternative sentencing for juvenile offenders; and Restorative Justice initiatives."

What We the People may offer is collaboration with public agencies and non-governmental organizations in fostering the greater flourishing of community service and philanthropy in the critical areas suggested by the Prime Minister.

Community service is not a panacea for our social ills. But, it is an indispensable means to community renewal and development.  It will not only help to address social ills and the uplifting and transformation of individual lives.  It will also encourage social solidarity, discouraging the isolation and remove many have towards the common good ensconced as they are in cul-de-sacs of self-absorption and gated communities of frenzied materialism.

SOLIDARITY
Solidarity is an essential virtue for those engaged in service as they are working in mutuality with the recipients of such service towards that common good and a shared future.  The patronizing or condescending mindset that one has come to save or rescue the poor, disadvantaged or marginalized rather than work with, is less effective in fostering mutual respect and genuine empowerment.

This sense of solidarity is exemplified by Rev. C. B. Moss, whose anti-crime work is really a pro-community worldview especially in historic Bain Town.  Where others see social problems and problem people he sees opportunities including wasted ones.  He sees lives that can be directed and redirected if various resources are invested in human capital and micro-initiatives from urban farming to training which may have macro results beyond Bain Town and adjacent communities.

We cannot restore community from a distance. It requires an engagement of our hearts and minds, our spirits and imagination, and our bodies or presence, one child or youth, prisoner or released offender or neighborhood or community at a time.

We are a small enough country to stem the criminal tide and respond to a myriad of family and social problems. It will not be easy, but it will be made easier if more of us are in the struggle rather than simply assigning blame or believing that this hard work is solely the responsibility of government.

Great leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. have made service of others the sine qua non of good citizenship and effective change.  In the process of change we change our community as well as ourselves. The work of change and renewal concerns internal conversion of our interior attitudes resulting in external actions exemplifying empathy and solidarity; more service and much less talk.

For decades, attorney Lowell Mortimer has been giving of himself and his resources. He has done so quietly, with integrity and generosity and a fine spirit. He deserves considerably more appreciation for his community service and philanthropic efforts including with the mentally disabled.

Some of his most recent work was his leadership, and collaboration with the Government in launching the Sybil Blyden Centre to provide vocational training and instruction for students with mental disabilities at the Stapledon School. He has also worked with the Freedom Foundation which gave a $10 million dollar grant to the College of the Bahamas, the largest in COB's history, for the groundbreaking Small Island Sustainability Project.

GOOD HEART
Mr. Mortimer is a recipient of the Lady Sassoon Golden Heart Award given by the Victor Sassoon (Bahamas) Heart Foundation. He shares that honor with Ms. Frances Ledee who worked for many years at the National Insurance Board. Both of these dedicated community servants would also be deserving of a good heart award from the Bahamian people.

Frances Ledee has exemplified "the spirit of community and we" as well as that of national and community service.  It is not only her service that is exemplary from her work in the Pilot Club of Nassau of which she is a founding member to the Bahamas Red Cross to the Persis Rodgers Home where she has served our elders with care and devotion for many years.

Ms. Ledee also serves with great cheer and an enthusiasm for life and service that is infectious and inspiring. She is ever encouraging, especially of young women to pursue their dreams, life-goals and the vocation to serve.  The spirit of community is deeply rooted in the Bahamian spirit, yet is always in need of renewal which is why the efforts of We the People are welcome. In invoking the spirit of Emancipation Day the group may consider utilizing its significant access to resources to help renew national and community service and assisting with youth development initiatives.

Next week's Front Porch will look especially at how we the people, the eponymous group and the Bahamian people may help to volunteer for, support and fund various initiatives that hold the promise of renewing the spirit of community service and address anti-social and criminal behavior.

From helping to revise and transform community service-learning programs in our schools to supporting youth programs such as the successful TARA Project to proposed alternative sentencing programs by institutions such as the Bahamas Conference of the Methodist Church (BCMC), we the people have many creative and effective means to renew our communities.

Next week, Front Porch will also review how the spirit of people like Lowell Mortimer and Frances Ledee as well as Livingstone and Claire Hepburn and the TARA Xavier Hepburn Foundation, Dr. Reginald Eldon, Colin Moss, Andrea Gibson and the BCMC's Peace and Justice Institute, and Ed Fields, Phillip Simon and founding and other members of We the People might cultivate service networks and linkages to harness Bahamian ingenuity and imagination and social entrepreneurship in a renaissance of community and national service.

The mystic and theologian Teilhard de Chardin inspired: "Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love.  Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire."

Even as we continue our national development, including the harnessing of the winds and waves and the brilliance of the sun as alternative energy, there is an even greater renewable energy we can harness to revivify our common purpose and replenish our national spirit.

That energy is love and service in a rediscovery of our religious and Christian service and consciences as well as Bahamian citizenship beyond the economic and social difficulties of the moment and the cynicism and indifference that often blinds us to the community and national service being done by so many and our individual and collective call to go and do likewise.

There is too much work to be done and no time for apathy, self-pity and giving in to the doomsayers or purveyors of false hope. Then there are the lazy complainers who might want to stop whining about the problems and find a student to tutor or a house of an elderly indigent person to repair or some cause beyond their own navel-gazing and self-absorption.
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