Social Impact with Emma » Member of Parliament : A Jamaica Gleaner Blog

Fifteen Strong, and a Woman’s Supportive Voice

November 25th, 2019

I shared in a happy event last week, at the headquarters of Digicel, downtown. Their lobby unfortunately has a huge echo effect, so the voices of employees chatting as they waited for the elevator did a ricochet around my head. It is however a bright and lofty space. Regardless of the voices, we joined the […]

Women in Business and Politics: Finding a Safe Space

May 20th, 2016

The room was packed. In the end, we were squeezing chairs into small spaces, and it grew rather warm. The occasion was a discussion on Promoting Women in Business and Politics: Pros and Cons, organized by the 51% Coalition and Women Business Owners, in Kingston. Perhaps there more “cons” than “pros” arose during the conversation, which was […]

Rwandan Women: Peace Leaders, Advocates and Implementers

November 9th, 2015

“South-South” really does mean something, you know. To me, it means discovering links, parallels, connections you never guessed would have existed. You are not getting pre-packaged prescriptions from those countries to the North, while you make huge efforts to fit your own experience into the templates they offer, quite often finding them lacking. South-South is […]

Thoughts on Campaign Finance: Does The Dog Wag His Own Tail?

October 9th, 2015

Back in 1997, a darkly humorous film was released entitled “Wag The Dog,” The stars were Dustin Hoffman, who played a Hollywood producer. Hoffman goes to work for a Washington spin doctor (Robert DiNiro) ahead of presidential elections. The movie, although fiction, had a ring of reality; the Lewinsky scandal broke just a few weeks later. […]

Homeless LGBT Youth Are Not “No One”

June 25th, 2015

Member of Parliament for South East St. Andrew Julian Robinson acknowledged, long ago, that he could not ignore the peculiar predicament of the “homeless gays,” as they are called, in a particular (comfortable, middle-class) part of his constituency. “This issue is not going away for me,” says Robinson, and as political representative he is duty bound […]