Chrisette Benjamin was doing extra reading for one of her elective courses at UWI when something caught her eye. The topic was poverty alleviation.
As part of the Rio Claro West Secondary school's Young Leaders Club Benjamin learnt that the Mayaro/Rio Claro region has one of the highest rates of poverty in TT.
She said learning about poverty in the area was an eye opener and from there she decided to do something to solve that issue of poverty.
“I was also student council president (at Rio Claro West), and I would be privy to some information on students who were unable to attend school because their parents had them home helping out," Benjamin said.
“So, poverty was something that I could have seen happening at school and we (in the student council) had the ability to somehow address that.”
She mobilised the council’s resource to organise resources to do food drives and fundraisers to help the school’s underprivileged students.
After graduating from secondary school, Benjamin began undergraduate studies in international relations at the UWI St Augustine campus. It was in her second year in 2019 that she began an elective in social development and her reading on poverty alleviation.
One author theorised that giving “handouts” to those in need is sometimes not the best way alleviate poverty. Instead, the author argued that making investments in and improving access to education, for those in need, would be a much more powerful tool for poverty eradication.
This was the spark that lit the fuse for the I Believe in Success (IBIS) Foundation.
Benjamin had had the idea for an initiative to assist underprivileged students in Rio Claro and environs since 2018, but here was the impetus to hit the ground running.
"I had already gotten some volunteers to do work on a project that works with demotivated students who come from backgrounds with socio-economic constraints.” So she already had a few individuals on hand to get work going.
The foundation’s first project supported students from 14 primary schools in the Rio Claro area who were writing the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) exam that year.
“If you start by supporting younger students, they will get the idea that they can come out of poverty using education," she said.
From the 14 schools, ten students were given free tutoring in preparation for the SEA exam, and 14 other were given care hampers.
“We wanted the schools to nominate a student who fit the criteria of having socio-economic constraints and meeting academic performance (standards).
“What my team would have done was tutored these students and supplied (them) with things like...socks, cream, soap or even motivation.”
For six weekends, leading up to the exam, students in the project were tutored at the Rio Claro library.
Part of the project included UWI students writing the students motivational letters.
After the exam in July 2019, the foundation held an SEA awards ceremony which was not exclusive to the students who were supported by the foundation’s project. The top 20
