Part of Natasha Daly’s mission is to seek to persuade the private sector as a whole to pay more attention to social causes that enhance the quality of the Guyanese society and by extension create an enabling environment in which business can better thrive. She contends, for example, that if children can secure their schooling in a more convivial environment, buttressed where necessary by the subsidy of a business community imbued with a spirit of corporate social responsibility then the Guyana society will be all the better prepared to host a successful business community.
Few issues, Daly believes, warrant more attention than enhancing the self-esteem of young girls in a society where emotional and physical abuse of women has become commonplace and where the retrieval of self-esteem is often beyond the capacity of the local social services.
Much of the crisis facing young girls, Daly says, reposes in a school system that offers no solutions to what are often problems of self-esteem. She used to be a Personnel Officer at the Teaching Service Commission but since 2007 she has been teaching Business, Accounts and Office Administration in the school system, first, at St. George’s Secondary and thereafter at New Guyana School. It was here that she secured a bird’s eye view of the challenges confronting young women and it was this that prompted her to create the Miss Summer Blaze Organization, an institution which she says is committed to salvaging the self-esteem of her charges.
Her biggest achievement, she believes, is the success she has realized in persuading the business community that their contribution to the work of the organization is an investment in Guyana that will pay dividends.
Since 2008 the Summer Blaze Pro-gramme has provided what Daly says are “platforms for the self-esteem of the girls. She still talks about the successful pageant staged at the Mildred Mansfield Club for 100 students. “I found that the girls were shy, that some of them might not have received the right foundation at home and that they lacked a sense of self-esteem.” Her mission, she says, was to help them to be more public persons, to build their self-confidence.
The private sector, she says, has been an invaluable part of Blaze’s pageants, providing both material support and linking the girls to their brands.
Nor are the intellectual needs of the children being neglected. The summer programme is providing tutoring in nine CXC students delivered by trained teachers at a cost of $10,000. “Where the fees are beyond the means of the parents we simply try to find a way,” she says.
Daly names Republic Bank, Nigel’s Supermarket, New GMC’s Guyana Shop, Vinu’s Shoe Box, Elegance Boutique, Chester Jewelry, Plus Size and Raphael’s Real Estate, among others. In the longer term her focus is to seek to attract more corporate sponsorship for the programme.
Tomorrow, Saturday, the Rama Krishna School will be the venue for the 2015 Miss Summer Blaze Festival. The girls, students of Kingston Secondary School will be afforded the opportunity of performing before their peers, their parents and their sponsors. Daly’s hopes is that the audience, not least their private sector benefactors will be sufficiently encouraged to sustain and even extend their generosity.
