The story of Servol: education for the community by the community.

Servol was born in the aftermath of the Black Power riots which rocked Trinidad and Tobago in 1970. Its founding members, acknowledging the cultural arrogance often present in people who want to do good, espoused a philosophy of attentive listening and developing projects based on ideas from the community.

After three years of trial and error, it was decided to focus on the two age groups suggested by the community children up to 5 years old, since these are the most critical years, and the 16- to 19-year-olds who had either dropped out of or failed in formal education.

The efforts of Servol in the sphere of early childhood care and education were enhanced through the support of the Bernard Van Leer Foundation of Holland, which not only gave extraordinary technical support to a programme in this area, but offered generous financial support for more than twenty years. With this assistance, a team of international experts was put together and it developed for teachers a curriculum in early childhood care and education that was of high quality and adapted to the culture of the Caribbean. It also received the ultimate accolade of excellence by having its certificate validated by Oxford University, which agreed to be the external examiners for the programme.

When it became known that Servol was offering such a training programme for teachers, requests were received from other Caribbean territories to expose their teachers to this type of high-quality training. As a consequence, our organization requested and obtained financial assistance from foundations in the United States and Europe to build a forty-bed hostel so that teachers could follow this programme for one year During the last twenty years. Servol has trained over 600 teachers from Anguilla, Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Montserrat, Nevis, Panama, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and The Turks and Caicos Islands.

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The adolescent programme began as a traditional skill-training centre, on the assumption that once a young person was trained in a marketable skill, employment could easily be found. The initial results were disappointing. A considerable number of apprentices dropped out and some who completed the programme preferred to rejoin the street gangs rather than look for a job.

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It became crystal clear that what was required was a prevocational course, which placed young people on a path to self-understanding, to recognize where things had gone wrong in their own development and to train them to be effective parents. Thus was born the Servol Adolescent Development Programme--a three-and-a-half-month course, which has been followed during the last twenty years by over 60,000 adolescents. The effect of the introduction of this course has been gratifying. The dropout rate is negligible and evaluation studies have shown that these young people, for the most part, have developed into caring parents. The outreach aspect of the Programme developed more slowly than its Early Childhood counterpart, but replicas now exist in the Bahamas, Dublin (Ireland). Grenada, Guyana, King's William Town (South Africa). St. Lucia and Dominica.

A curious anomaly persisted, in that though the Servol programmes were being disseminated all over the world, the Trinidad and Tobago Government remained curiously apathetic to what was going on under their noses. This was to change in 1986 when the Prime Minister of a newly-elected government asked Servol to disseminate its programmes throughout the country. This expansion went ahead without a hitch. The result is that today Servol oversees more than 180 early childhood centres and 30 adolescent centres scattered all over Trinidad and Tobago.

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Each of them is run by a Village Board of Education, which keeps a watchful eye on the centre, selects young women to be trained as teachers and pays their salaries with funds transferred to their account by the Ministry of Education via Servol.

In 1995, Servol approached the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for a loan to double the salaries of the Early Childhood teachers. A request was also made to include 25 parent-outreach facilitators to work with parents in poverty areas to ensure that children up to 3 years old received proper nourishment and appropriate parenting attention before they reached the age when they could enter an early childhood programme.

In 1994, a community elder approached Servol to request that training in computer literacy and advanced electronics be offered as a post-graduate course to Adolescent Programme graduates. This at first appeared to be unrealistic, since more than 30 per cent of the adolescents coming to Servol were functionally illiterate. Once again, we approached IDB and to our surprise the idea was taken seriously, and a generous grant was given for a period of five years to establish three hi-tech centres in North, Central and South Trinidad.

This programme has proved to be an outstanding success, out of which has emerged the most recent training development: the advanced skill training centre, which offers courses in computer repairs, compressor mechanics, computer-controlled electronics, instrumentation and general industrial maintenance. These courses will allow graduates to access well-paid jobs in the petroleum or liquefied natural gas sector, and this can be considered to be the final rung in the ladder which Servol has built to enable young people to climb out of the pit of poverty and frustration.

The Organization has been fortunate to have also received financial help and technical assistance from a number of educational foundations. First and foremost is the Bernard Van Leer Foundation of Holland, which provided generous technical and financial help over twenty years. Other important contributors have been the Inter-American Foundation (United States), MISEREOR (Germany) and HELVETAS (Switzerland), for infrastructure development for vocational training. Servol has also developed close relationships with the United Nations Children's Fund in Barbados and the United Nations Educational. Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Paris. Its Executive Director was asked to chair an international conference on pre-school education, convened by UNESCO in Paris in December 1982. In 1994, UNESCO selected Servol as one of the twenty best-case projects in the world and published a booklet on the organization entitled "On the Right Track". It was also awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize in 1994 by the Right Livelihood Foundation of Sweden.

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Sister Ruth Montrichard has been Executive Director of Servol since 1993. She has worked with the organization since 1975, where she has helped to develop and direct programmes for children and young people, as well as the teacher and management training programmes. She also taught in schools in Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada.

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