Guyana Foundation completes pilot phase of E’bo Sunrise Center

Oct 13, 2016 News

The Guyana Foundation recently announced that the pilot phase of its Sunrise Centre on the Essequibo Coast was successfully completed. This announcement was made last week at the Westin Hotel, Grand Cayman, during a presentation by the Foundation’s Founder, Supriya Singh-Bodden, C.C.H., and its Managing Director, Anthony Autar.

fourth from right Mrs Supriya Singh-Bodden with participants of the activity.

In attendance were members of the Rotary Club of Grand Cayman, and various other donors, who had provided funding for a significant portion of expenses to launch the Centre.
According to Singh-Bodden, the Sunrise Center is part of the Foundation’s ongoing efforts to provide urgently-needed training, counselling and support services to individuals and families across Guyana.
She highlighted the Foundation’s hopes to open other Centres in Guyana shortly. Meanwhile, Autar explained that during the pilot phase, certain services and programmes were offered free of charge to residents of the Essequibo Coast.
Professional counselling and mental health support services accessible six days a week in a confidential, comfortable environment; holistic wellness activities such as yoga and; skills training courses in the areas of fabric design, electrical installation, catering and floral arrangement. Goals and motivational seminars by overseas-based Guyanese professionals are also available.
Most of the facilitators and the mental health counsellors are from the Essequibo Coast, in keeping with the Foundation’s desire for the Center to be grassroots-based.
Autar indicated that during the pilot phase, one-on-one counselling and follow-up support services were provided to many individuals, while group sessions of varying sizes were also held with others.
Additionally, informational sessions on mental health topics were conducted with students enrolled in all the skills-training courses at the Centre. As part of the Foundation’s monitoring and evaluation programme, the mental well-being of all participants of the skills-training courses were assessed twice using a scale developed by a university in the United Kingdom.
Autar announced that improvement in mental well-being was recorded in over 85% of the participants who were assessed. Upon the completion of the presentation, the audience was treated to a fashion display by models wearing a line of clothing created from fabric produced by the Center’s fabric design class.
Mrs. Singh-Bodden disclosed that a fashion house in the Cayman Islands has placed an order for all the fabric designed by the Centre’s students, creating gainful employment for these individuals. The Guyana Foundation will now set up a small fabric printing workshop at its premises to assist the fabric designers to get started until they can go out on their own.
The Centre will be officially opened shortly and new courses will begin in November.
Mrs. Singh-Bodden made an appeal for more organisations, and individuals both in and out of Guyana to come on board to assist with this aspect of the Foundation’s work.
She said, “In order for Guyana to build a healthy investment climate the wellness of its people is absolutely the most important priority. We cannot be registering and reporting deaths by suicide in our newspapers then telling the world we are open for business. We need to fix this problem and give it the priority it deserves.”