U.S. Embassy Hands Over Three Million Belize Dollars in Grant Funding

The United States Embassy in Belize has been making donations to various initiatives across the country through the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation.  While there have been significant contributions in the areas of national and regional security, the embassy has also supported a number of social programs through the Central American Regional Security Initiative’s Economic Support Fund.  The idea is to confront the primary causes of crime and violence in Belize through a creative social and cultural approach.  Today, a total of one and a half million U.S. dollars was signed over to seven non-governmental organizations.  On hand to sign over the disbursements was Ambassador Carlos Moreno.

Carlos Moreno, U.S. Ambassador to Belize

Carlos Moreno

“First of all, I’m extremely proud of the proposals that you submitted.  It wasn’t an easy task to sift through all the proposals and there were many of them, but at the end of the day I was confident that we picked the best and the most creative proposals to address what we at the embassy see as some much needed resources for the projects in which you’re engaged.  We were really looking at this time at marginalized groups like women and other marginalized groups in Belize and we also wanted to focus on at-risk youths.  And we also wanted to focus on other sorts of aspects of that like the arts and media and things like that, culture, away from what we sometimes see at the embassy and the grants it gives, away from say the law enforcement, military type assistance.  Really, I think that we can all agree that if we are really going to combat violence and poverty in Belize we really have to look at really the roots of crime and violence and so forth and the roots really can all be addressed, we think, through programs such as yours that are working on the educational front, on the cultural front and so forth.  So we looked at things like job development and creativity, we looked at leadership opportunities to develop real future leadership opportunities in Belize and we want to look at conflict resolution skills in ways at teaching young people, at-risk youths in particular, that there are other ways of resolving conflicts other than by violence.  So if you’re wondering how we came about to select each of you in your diverse ways, that really is the long and short of it.  It’s one point five million dollars, which is no small sum over a period of two years and each of you is more than deserving of this kind of grant from the United States government.”