Entrepreneurs at St Mary’s Church showcase products and services

An avenue of gifts and opportunities. This is how Project Lead, Angella Philips, described the first-ever showcase of St Mary’s Church’s business festival entitled “Our Gifts, Our Opportunities”.

The festival, which runs from May 21 to 22, aims to help church members who are entrepreneurs, showcase their products and services to the wider public.

Philips says the idea came out of a need from within the church body to find new ways to better engage with their parishioners. It was felt that because of the many job losses caused by COVID 19, that a platform for new business owners should be provided to help jumpstart businesses.

“A number of people in our congregation would have lost their jobs, some of them were forced into new adventures, adventures that they never knew that they [would] have, and we noticed this within our congregation but how were we going to get others to buy into that?

“It started out as just a display for the members of the congregation, then it started to evolve. Rogation is coming up – rogation is about giving praise and thanks for your gifts and for your talents, so we thought it was the perfect opportunity to launch what we decided to call our business festival. We wanted an avenue for persons in the congregation who were doing things that we did not know anything about, we wanted them to display and be able to sell their products and services,” she explained.

Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Business Development, Sandra Husbands, who was also on hand to officially open the festival, spoke glowingly of the church’s effort to support small business persons, and said Government has also seen it as a priority to continue in its mandate to provide a wide variety of services in support of helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses to the next level.

“Our Ministry is committed to the transformation of Barbados by releasing the entrepreneurial spirit within every person, and part of what we are here to do is to change what is happening on the landscape so that we are able to provide a platform that allows everyone to be able to participate in whatever area of economic development they wish to get involved in.

“We recognize that if we are going to be successful in this, we have to treat to what people think and believe about business.” (SB)