the Ministries of Health and Local Government and the USAID GHARP Project II

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-plans innovative ventures for new yearInnovative plans geared at improving the services offered by Youth Challenge Guyana (YCG) are being streamlined for this year. This disclosure was made by Executive Director, Dmitri Nicholson, who revealed yesterday that the intent is to ensure that 2011 yields even more successful outcomes over last year.According to Nicholson, last year was in fact an exceptional year for the Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) which had sought to consolidate its programmes to make sure that it was indeed meeting the needs of the target communities.“We were able to put our programmes into perspective and how we should work with communities and how we collect information from them…We were also able to look at staff and their capabilities on the job and their efficacies as individuals…and we were also able to improve our relationships with our partners as well.”During the past year, Nicholson said, the YCG was able to incorporate more companies in its testing outreach. He noted that more companies had sought to come on board as did individuals who, according to him, saw HIV testing as a regular part of their lives.“They viewed our mobile teams as a regular service and wanted to have them. Communities within Georgetown, and even those in the interior, wrote and asked us to provide counselling and testing to them.”In the past year, too, efforts were made to support the owners of barbershops and salons with whom YCG was able to forge relationships in the past, in an attempt to help address sexual health.According to Nicholson, YCG was able to sustain them with supplies of condoms, pamphlets and brochures through unfunded efforts.It was last year, too, that the NGO received funding from the United Nations Development Fund for its Youth Employability and Leadership project. The project was an ongoing one, but received renewed funding from UNDP in June of last year for the first time.“This allowed us to meet more young people with skills to reduce conflict in the community as well as skills to be successful in the workplace,” Nicholson revealed.A total of 25 youths were trained in this regard and a number of them were able to benefit from a stint of internship at companies which were very receptive, he added.He pointed out that the young people were on their own – with some guidance from facilitators and coordinators of organisations – able to implement community projects that were geared towards raising the self esteem of youths while lowering conflict in their communities and emerging as community leaders.YCG was also able to perform creditably in the area of the delivery of education, through its teachers’ volunteer programme by augmenting its quota of volunteers. In fact, Nicholson revealed, the number of volunteers was increased last year by more than 100 percent, a development which is expected to be retained this year.This programme, which is undertaken in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), was expanded to not only remote locations but to every single administrative region, according to Nicholson.YCG’s Parent/Mentorship programme also realised immense success as the NGO was able to secure better training for Parent Mentors and dispatch them into more communities to work with parents.But according to the Executive Director, 2010 did not come without its challenges, some of which were realised as YCG attempted to up the ante and improve the scale at which efforts were made to reach communities.Nicholson explained that it was recognised that in order for YCG to improve its operation, more resources would have been required and that was no little challenge to obtain.“We found it quite a challenge to find the amount of resources required to reach communities…It was a challenge to find the funding that matched the actual needs of the communities, because some of the needs of the communities did not necessarily match the types of grants that were available.”However, in such cases, he said the YCG was forced to engage alternate ways to meet some of the needs, though all were not met.  This state of affairs, he attributed to the global economic challenges that the world was confronted with and thereby impacted the operation of the organisation causing a reduction of available funding.However, the operation was able to benefit from the support of the Canadian International Development Agency, the Ministries of Health and Local Government and the USAID GHARP Project II, as well as some other private sector entities.For this year, Nicholson said that YCG has plans to reach more men through its counselling and testing programme as it has been recognised that fewer men access the service. In addition, he revealed that there are plans to use more innovative measures in HIV prevention work.There also programmes streamlined for this year to work on improving the education skills of community leaders through distance education and to work with women entrepreneurs to improve the effectiveness of their businesses.Women are among the specific target group, Nicholson said, in recognition of the fact that they are among the most vulnerable in the communities.The women project, he explained, will receive funding from Exxon Mobil, while the community leader programme will gain support from the Delegation of the European Union.