Mrs. Hyacinth Bradley says much progress is being made with the Community Desk initiative, a public relations effort involving various Anguilla Government workers who are providing well-needed information to persons throughout the island.
Mrs. Bradley, a former Senior Programme Officer with the Department of Youth and Culture, now serves in the position of Community Services Planner in the Ministry of Social Development. She provides support to the Departments of Youth, Culture and Sports and also chairs the National Anti-Violence Committee.
“The Community Desk came out of a need based on interactions my colleagues and I would have had with community folks,” she told The Anguillian. “What I realise is that some people are not sure how to access proper public services; what to do and what are the relevant forms; and some persons are actually timid to go to the offices to speak to the relevant officers.
“In the true spirit and true definition of public service, we came up with an initiative where we could decentralise our services instead of staying in the offices and have our customers and stakeholders come to us – we go to them. In order to address that, public service officers are now stationed in the various communities at a given time. They are mostly stationed in the evening or morning times. During the morning you can find public service officers at the health clinics, and in the evening we target churches, community informal and social groups.
“The visiting senior officers are from across the Anguilla public service and statutory bodies. For the cycle that was launched on May 8, we have ANGLEC, Social Security, the Departments of Inland Revenue, Education, Probation, Social Development, Health Protection and the Air and Seaport Authority, among other departments.
“We identify the services we provide and engage the community in formal and informal settings. The Community Desk is going very well and it was only on Friday, May 18, that we finished the second week. We have had seven Community Desks so far and we dialogued with approximately 253 customers around Anguilla. The intention is to have all public services form part of the Community Desk and to ensure that we have a more conversant and knowledgeable community – and that the community will feel more at ease to dialogue and shared recommendations; give their viewpoints and speak about their challenges and issues.”
Mrs. Bradley said a pilot programme was launched on February 19. The public service officers are now in the middle of the initiative with a number of additional Government departments and statutory bodies coming on board.
“In our interactions with the community, persons have been requesting a lot of information about such matters as Customs, Labour, Immigration, Education, Social Development and Inland Revenue,” she added. “Quite recently, persons have been asking about Disaster Management and ANGLEC particularly seeing that we are now coming into a new hurricane season. We have just started slow and small, but the hope is to have an ongoing programme on Anguilla where public service officers will engage persons across the island.”
