GWR hosts successful civic fundraiser

May 07, 2015 News

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…Monies to fund buses for elections day transportation

By Desilon Daniels
For many persons, Elections Day can prove to be extremely taxing; at each polling station, hundreds

of persons gather from the crack of dawn, all lined up impatiently for their turns with the ballot box. Some persons are forced to travel long distances from their homes.
Indeed, the thought of just how exhausting the entire process is, deters many persons from voting, but the Guyanese Women Roundtable (GWR) is hoping to play its part in helping Guyanese on Elections Day by transporting persons in Regions Three and Four.
On Monday evening, more than 100 hundred persons, mostly women, turned out at the Pegasus Hotel for a dinner to help the GWR realize its goal.
In an interview with Kaieteur News following the event, GWR senior member Dr. Dawn Stewart explained that the buses will transport mainly the elderly to the polls to vote between 6:00 am and noon.
“We want them to be able to vote and get back home early so they can just relax. This time is very tense and people are anxious like in any other country…so we want people to be able to be quiet, comfortable and calm and just listen to hear the official results in a comfortable environment,” Dr. Stewart said.
She said, too, that the turnout at the dinner had been a pleasant surprise for the organisation. She said that GWR had been unable to push the event as much to the general public as she would have liked but nonetheless, received good feedback.
“On a limited budget – a very small scale effort – it really turned out phenomenally,” Stewart said. “Our target was to have a hundred persons and we had 108. It was well constructed and the time was used up very effectively.”
She said that persons were able to explore the opportunity and the information presented on why it is necessary for Guyanese women to vote and to engage in civic participation by letting their voices be heard.

She added that, thanks to globalisation, Guyana is becoming more and more exposed to resources that had previously been unavailable.
“That gives us ways we can envision how we can implement programmes, projects and how we can gauge our elected officials. So, we had those types of discussions and actually it turned into an opportunity for the audience to also ask our guest speaker some questions, which was really good,” Stewart said.
The event’s guest speaker was Linden-born lawyer, Marcia Johnson-Blanco, who is the Co-Director for the US-based Voting Rights Project. What had started out as a typical presentation, eventually moved on to a lively and involved discussion, Dr Stewart said.
She added that the audience had many questions. Many of their issues were about fear in engaging elected officials and candidates on issues affecting their lives and communities.
“People expressed fear of doing that, of being able to have a conversation with their elected officials. However, I think that it is important that people understand that they have the right to have an engagement with persons  they select to run Guyana, so that they can understand that issues are the things that are affecting them,” Stewart emphasized.
She said, too, that the event focused on crafting solutions to everyday problems facing Guyana. Noting the environmental issues plaguing Georgetown, Stewart said that communities can create small teams and come up with strategies to deal with the unhealthy environment.
In turn, these strategies can be pushed toward nominated government officials.
Overall, Dr Stewart deemed the event a success and one that the GWR hopes to replicate in the future.
“We finished at about 9:30 [pm] but people hung around until about 10:30, talking, asking questions and networking; I thought it was really impressive.”
She continued, “We had both men and women and youths there and that was really good; we gave them challenges and helped to educate them that it’s not only around elections time that we do this; elections time gives us that opportunity because our candidates now need our support but this must be an ongoing effort throughout the five years that the candidates now become the government. They should be able to answer to us about the things they said they’ll do.”
The GWR is a recently established non-governmental organisation that seeks to get persons involved in the electoral process. Stewart emphasised that the GWR does not just focus on women but Guyanese as a whole.
“When people hear about the Women’s Roundtable, I guess in Guyana they have the perception that it’s all about women but it’s not all about women. We know that women are peacekeepers, they are nurturers, they manage families and things like that, so we feel like what women are experiencing, not only does it benefit women but it benefits the entire nation. The issues the women talk about, that we get from the ground are issues that affect our entire population,” Dr Stewart said.
According to her, she had sat on the Black Women’s Roundtable in the US and from that, decided that Guyana would benefit from a similar initiative.
“Being part of that committee, I thought that would be something to really benefit Guyana. I wanted to have it instituted in Guyana and have it work where we can now change the playing field of how we get involved in the political process; it doesn’t mean running for office.
“It just means advocating, bringing issues to the floor, engaging not only the communities but our elected officials in conversations about issues affecting the community,” she said.
Other than its civic component, the GWR has literacy and health components.

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