The Partners For Youth Foundation returns as an official charity partner of the upcoming Grace Jamaican Jerk Festival. The festival will be held on November 13 at the Miramar Regional Park.
A pillar in the South Florida area, Partners For Youth focuses on the emotional, social, academic, and cultural development of children and adolescents in South Florida’s Jamaican diaspora, and in Jamaica. The foundation was started over 30 years ago as a finishing service for children and adolescents who emigrated to the United States and suffered from culture shock. Partners For Youth has evolved over the years to include the annual Miss Jamaica Florida pageant, which focuses on personhood over beauty, as well as scholarships that have propelled recipients into lucrative careers from medicine to law and everything in-between, and seminars touching on sensitive and important topics such as mental health and navigating the perils of social media.
Under charismatic chairman Steve Higgins, Partners For Youth has big plans for the upcoming jerk festival. “Partners for Youth will be large, in charge, and noticeable,” proclaims Higgins. “You’ll see us in our tents with our branded polo shirts, helping patrons learn what they need to know about our culture.”
Also a tenor soloist, musician, public speaker, actor, director and producer, Higgins has made a name for himself as an ambassador of Jamaican folk culture, particularly within the realm of music. He has traveled to five different continents teaching members of the Jamaican diaspora, and the Jamaica-curious alike, songs of old.
Higgins says he is bringing a similar energy to the festival where the foundation’s main theme will be passing on classic Jamaican games to the younger generations. “I’m talking bull in the pen, dandy shandy, brown girl in the ring,” Higgins excitedly lists off a handful of the games he plans on teaching. “A lot of these things we clearly have lost, because my interviewer doesn’t even know them,” he exclaims, pointedly.
The Partners for Youth Foundation is a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization. Partners for Youth is the non-profit sponsor of the annual Grace Jamaican Jerk Festival, with a portion of the event’s proceeds dedicated to the Anthony Baker Scholarship Fund and other initiatives spearheaded by the foundation.
