City Council launches Adopt a Child Program
The Belize City Council launched its Adopt a Child Program this afternoon but the City Councillors aren’t exactly taking children home. They are making contributions to worthy institutions to which we entrust our children every day.
Councillor Mark King explained this new venture.
Mark King, City Councillor
“The council found it necessary and very important that we find a way to assist needy children in schools. We believe the government is doing a very strong part in that and we also want to play our role. What we have done is we have had discussions with prominent businessmen who are going to support this programme throughout the year. We are going to be receiving donations by way of sums of monies from these business people. They will write these in the name of the City Council and then probably in a month or two, we will then forward them to a needy school. There’s a criteria for this whereby the school must apply to show how the monies are going to be spent and how they are needed. What we are going to do is today we are donating this sum of money—it’s a thousand dollars—to St Luke school and we found them to be the most needy at this time because they had mentioned they needed to buy some books for children, they needed to buy some other stuff for feeding programmes and things that will definitely help throughout their school year.”
Bernadine Pollard, Principal, St. Luke Methodist Primary
“When we were first informed about the programme, we decided to choose the adopt a child programme because we know we have a number of children whose parents are not able to meet the requirements to keep them functional. So we have identified about a hundred children most needy who this money will be applied to in meeting their seventy dollars maintenance fee for the upkeep of the school and a portion will go towards the feeding programme which will provide lunch for them at midday.”
Bernadine Pollard says that Compassionate Hearts Alliance run by James Petri also contributes substantially to St. Luke’s feeding programme.
