PM Mottley urges families to join One Family drive to rebuild social fabric

Prime Minister Mia Mottley has called on Barbadians to take personal responsibility for mending the country’s social fabric, urging families to get directly involved in government’s One Family Programme as part of a wider effort to reduce poverty and strengthen community bonds.

“With this Social Empowerment Agency, we really have now to ensure that we can make that difference to allow each of our citizens to become productive,” she said. “Because why? We need you. We need you to help build out the social capital in communities so that our young people don’t believe that a gun is a tool of trade. We need you to build out the social capital in our communities so that people can become productive.”

Mottley was speaking at the launch of the first Social Empowerment Agency (SEA) client centre at Six Roads, St Philip, on Wednesday, where she linked the new integrated social services model to a broader call for citizens to help rebuild the island’s social fabric at the community level.

The prime minister stressed that while the government was restructuring social services to be more responsive and humane, poverty could not be fought by the state acting in isolation. She said the One Family Programme was deliberately designed to move families “from dependence to independence to nurture interdependence”, relying not only on public sector support but also on private sector and community involvement.

“The battle to lift families from dependence to independence to nurture interdependence must happen not because government alone is integrating the services that we can give you, or the private sector has come on board to help you,” she said.

Mottley framed the programme as both a moral and practical obligation for those who are economically stable.

She urged Barbadians who had not yet signed on to the initiative to do so. “So that I appeal to the nation, the people of Barbados, if you have not yet committed to helping in the One Family Programme, please come forward.”

Mottley cautioned against viewing support purely in financial terms, arguing that empowerment often depended more on human connection than on money. “You can always give money, but money isn’t the only currency that helps to empower,” she said. “The currency that helps to empower most is a listening ear and a helping hand, a warm heart, and voices that literally encourage others to believe that they are in a safe place when they are speaking with you.”

To underscore her point, Mottley cited a recent incident involving several boys who had got into trouble, noting that a business owner opted for a restorative approach instead of prosecution. “Rather than ask the police to prosecute, they asked the police to stand down, and they met with the parents and the youngsters,” she said.

She said she later met with the boys, their parents, Minister of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs Kirk Humphrey and a pastor at Ilaro Court. Agreements, she said, were then made to reward positive behaviour, including academic improvement.

“One of them was to buy a table tennis board… for the youngest of the lot, who was 11,” Mottley said, adding that the business owner went further by committing to transport the boys each Saturday to a sporting association. “That is what our business is about. This is who we are,” she said.

The prime minister also appealed to Barbadians’ sense of fairness and faith. “All of us in here can remember stories in communities of the police in the day giving somebody a chance, because let us be honest, none of us are perfect,” she said. “And if we don’t be the country, and the people that give people a second chance, what is the basis of the religious faith of Christianity, if it is not about redemption and opportunities, and forgiveness?”