Our School Feeding Programme is now in ten schools!
For the past six years, Jamaica Energy Partners and West Kingston Power Partners have attended to the nutritional needs of basic school students in the West Kingston and Old Harbour Bay areas. In 2019, the newest addition to the JEP Group, Jamaica Private Power Company also launched its school feeding programme for students who reside in Eastern Kingston.
The programme is an annual initiative implemented to promote that a balanced diet and maintaining a healthy lifestyle for our children is crucial. The Group understands that proper nutrition is essential from the earliest stage in life and, therefore, recognize the need to facilitate the process of ensuring that students receive nutritious breakfast meals.
Our Group slogan: Powering A Brighter Future, says it all- we invest heavily in the success of our youth. These students are the future, and they are brilliant, we, therefore, believe that it is our duty to ensure that they receive the best nutrition. Too often, parents are unable to send their children to school because they cannot provide breakfast or due to financial constraints. We want to ease this burden and, ensure that students receive a balanced meal every morning,” Wayne McKenzie, President & CEO of JEP and WKPP.
Since 2014, JEP and WKPP have donated funds to the Blackwood Gardens and Charles Chin Loy Basic Schools respectively. In 2017, the year of the programme’s official launch, we extended our breakfast offerings to Carnival Early Childhood Development Basic School and Denham Town Infant School. From 2017 to date, we now boast giving back to an additional six schools – Port Royal Infant School, as well as Adastra, Prophecy, Glenford Phipps, Solomon Levy and Bower Bank Basic Schools.
Like every project, encountering challenges is inevitable, and 2020 came with an unprecedented ordeal – COVID-19. The novel virus meant we had to adjust our strategies and execution plans. The pandemic not only infected and claimed lives, but also disrupted livelihoods and forced schools closures. Such a drastic change led us to transform the programme to continue to provide for the students and ease the burdens of hundreds of parents and guardians.
Each month the JEP Group provides food packages as well as personal care products to the currently home-schooled students. The packages include tinned foods, meats, flour, cornmeal, sugar, a variety of cereals, cow’s milk/milk powder as well as bar soaps, tissue and rubbing alcohol. A big thanks to the teachers from all schools who received the packages for distribution to parents. The students will continue to receive these items until school reopens, and the nation returns to normalcy.
