Two representatives from Tottenham Hotspur in the United Kingdom are currently on a working visit to Anguilla under the auspices of the Department of Youth and Culture.
Mr. Dan Dodge and Mr. Myri Demetriou are engaged in working with Government agencies, focusing on providing training to youth mentors, sports coaches and social workers. In essence, they are conducting training for young people, in general, through education, particularly in the area of life-skills and development. An opening ceremony to a ten-day stint of training sessions took place at Le Vue Boutique Inn on the morning of Tuesday, March 19th.
Mr. Bren Romney, Director of Youth and Culture, stated: “The Tottenham Hotspur Premier League approved a grant project for Anguilla which stretches for January 1st to December 31st, 2019. During this time, there will be a series of three visits to Anguilla by Tottenham Hotspur, and this is the first. In each visit, Tottenham Hotspur will be assessing what we are doing in Anguilla in the areas of training our young people in life-skills.
“We have twenty-five persons in the first training session who are representing government and civic organizations that work directly with young people in a range of areas including life-skills, employability, values, development and such like.
“These two representatives from Tottenhan would be actually conducting ‘train the trainers’ workshops. They would train these twenty-five participants, who would then go back to their agencies and train their personnel there, whether they be program officers or support staff, so that we in Anguilla would always be providing best practices in the area of life-skills training for our young people.
“This is a very ambitious project,” Mr. Romney said, “in that we are empowering this first twenty-five, and on their second visit they would be training another twenty-five, so it is ongoing throughout the year.”
Mr. Romney said that the two Tottenham trainers will be working specifically with two designated groups of young people. He said that between 9:00 and 10:30 a.m. they would be engaged with training for persons who are involved in the job link-up program of WISE and PRU. Then in the afternoon sessions, they will be training young people involved in sports and the after-school program.
Parliamentary Secretary, Mr. Cardigan Connor who has responsibility for sports addressed the ceremony by saying: “It is my pleasure to welcome Dan any Myri to conduct these life-skills training sessions for our youth. While Myri brings us his skills from teaching, Dan offers us skills from a sports and coaching background.
“All of you are here from the various spheres of mentoring, so you will understand why we are here. The interest is about our youth… It is quite interesting and
Dan Dodge & Myri Demetriou
beneficial for us to have both a teacher and a coach to facilitate these training sessions. I am sure that over the next few days you would find these sessions to be indeed beneficial.”
Dan Dodge spoke on behalf of himself and Myri Demetriou. He expressed their appreciation for being involved in the training of the young. He said, “While Myri came from a teaching kind of background, I have come from a sports, coaching and mentoring background. The skills that we bring are varied. But first we want to learn from what positions the youth here are at. We will assess the needs and then make our training input.”
Mr. Romney echoed the intent of Dan and Myri by stating that they will be assessing where our youth are at and see what value they can add in passing on their skill sets and new ideas to our programs.
Written by Staff Reporter, James Harrigan
