The Jamaica Cultural Development Commission will host its highly anticipated National Culture Clubs Virtual Conference 2021 on Tuesday, February 22 under the theme “60 and Beyond…Re-igniting the Cultural Spirit”. Beginning at 2:00 p.m. the conference will be live-streamed on the JCDC’s Facebook and YouTube pages, Jamaica Cultural Development Commission and JCDC Jamaica1 respectively.

The annual conference, which sees the bringing together of the JCDC’s Culture Club leadership from across the island to reflect on the past year’s achievements and activities while making plans for the upcoming year, was postponed last November due to circumstances surrounding the pandemic.

“Our Culture Clubs is another avenue that the JCDC uses to preserve Jamaica’s culture. By establishing these clubs in schools and other youth-centered and community-based institutions, we are able to directly impact the culture that our young people consume. We expose them to various tangible and intangible aspects of our traditional culture, while also providing them with training and exposure opportunities, so that they may also hone their own cultural talents,” said Mrs. Marjorie Leyden-Kirton, Director of Community Cultural Development Services at the JCDC.

“This annual conference gives us an opportunity to gather all these young, dynamic minds which make up the leadership of our clubs throughout the island, to reflect on what we have achieved thus far, both as individual clubs and as a national collective and to make plans for the future,” she continued.

“We also engage cultural experts to present their own forward-thinking ideas to our members based on the conference’s theme. In previous years, this impressive exchange of cultural wealth could only be experienced firsthand by the few members who were selected to participate in the conference, but now that we are staging the conference virtually, anyone with access to the internet can now benefit,” Mrs. Leyden-Kirton concluded.

The keynote speaker for the National Culture Club Conference 2021 will be the Honourable Olivia Grange, Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport (MCGES), while the panelists will include Mr. Roland Watson Grant a renowned Jamaican novelist and screenwriter, and Dr. Dominique Reid, Miss Jamaica Festival Queen 2021.

The conference’s virtual audience will also be treated to a live performance by Popular Reggae artiste Yaksta the “ambition boss” and 2021 Jamaica Festival Song second-place winner and popular Reggae artiste, DB.

The JCDC, in recognizing the importance of preserving Jamaica’s culture and heritage, established a series of Culture Clubs in schools and other community-based organizations across the island, with the main aim of the Clubs being to focus on our nation’s young people through whom our customs and traditions can be channeled and preserved. The established Culture Clubs actively engage youth in a number of activities including Jamaica Day/Night Celebrations, Heritage Week Celebrations, Emancipation & Independence Day Celebrations, community projects, and the staging of civic functions in schools and community clubs such as Flag Raising ceremonies.

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