A chance, somewhat unpleasant encounter with a government official in a hair salon, later became an opportunity for Ayo Dalgety-Dean to start working in the area of child rights in Guyana and today she heads a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which is known for working with children, especially those who are sexually abused.
Blossom Inc got its name during a conversation with her young daughters as she told them she wanted to form an organisation to work with children to help them blossom. One then asked her why not call the organisation Blossom, and so it is today.
Long before she returned to Guyana from England, Dalgety-Dean, whose background is in finance, knew she wanted to work with children and actually had hands-on experience during her early university years. But she also knew that she did not want to take the social worker path.
Today Blossom Inc employs some 26 staff members throughout the country as it is one of the NGOs that works with the Child Advocacy centres. But were it not for that argument she had in the salon with that official (whose identity she did not know at the time) on children’s issues, maybe her work with children on local soil would not have commenced so soon.
“We became best of friends, you know, after an hour of backward and forward…,” she told Stabroek Weekend. It was only after they left the salon that she was told who the official was.
She later received a call from the said individual and was asked to sit on the visiting committee for children’s homes. She acceded and was later voted chair of that committee; following that she became a member of the adoption board.
But it was the call by Child Care and Protection Agency Director Ann Greene for the one-stop centres now known as the Child Advocacy centres for the reporting and treatment of child sexual abuse, that solidified the deal.
“I was like, this is my thing. And she [Greene] invited me to a meeting… ten days later, Blossom Inc became a reality… The rest is history,” she said.
That was six years ago, and she said it has been a good journey. For her the work of the organisation is necessary as there is so much abuse of children, but she was quick to note that it is no different from other countries.
For last year alone, she said, Blossom Inc conducted some 396 forensic interviews. It is not the only organisation doing this, there is ChildLink that also works with advocacy centres, and as Dalgety-Dean pointed out cases are underreported.
“It is horrendous. It is horrendous. People ask me all the time [how do I keep going] and I think that is how I know it is my calling because someone has to do it, and everyone has their niche. I am doing this and someone else is doing something else that is also required…,” she said.
Exhausted
The organisation has had to do so much work, especially in recent times, that Dalgety-Dean said she and the staff are exhausted at times. But they know they have to keep plodding on since there is no let up.
“Old Year’s night I got a call. And on New Year’s Day we got another a call about two children being raped by their father…,’ she revealed.
“At the moment I know I am overwhelmed. I am very close to full and I know I have to take care of myself.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise in the cases, but Dalgety-Dean also believes that the more successful prosecutions there are, then the more reports would be made, and she gave kudos to the judiciary for the Sexual Offences Court being up and running in a COVID environment.
Owing to the pandemic, Blossom had to switch to mostly online therapy and this was facilitated through some funding from the British High Commission, which allowed for data or phone plans for staff members to call clients and have psychosocial support sessions. In real emergencies, in-person sessions had to be done as well.
Last year, she said, she was forced to reorganize Blossom to have an officer in charge of victim support services to assist with clients navigating the court system. She saw the importance of designating one person as going to court is a great commitment and huge job.
Importantly, she said, she did an evaluation of Blossom’s data and found that some 405 cases are unaccounted for.
“Meaning that over the years since Blossom started to now, we have done the forensic interviews, but we don’t know where the cases are. We are calling the police stations, they don’t know; the DPP [Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions] don’t know, but we know. We have the cases. These things happened. Where are they in the system?” she asked.
This situation has caused her now to have a staff member to track the cases, and call police stations to find out if there was insufficient evidence, just to find out what happened to those children. She said they were always tracking cases, but because the staff members were doing the forensic interviews, the therapy, and going to the court, they just could not keep up. She has had to channel them and allow some to just work in one specific area. She will now have a victim service unit, which would entail the court support, tracking of cases and the review of cases.
She pointed out that after therapy it could be years before the victim’s case reaches the court and so check-ins have to be done.
Two years ago, as well, with support from UNICEF, they were able to offer an extended service for the migrant population in Guyana and now this is being done through centres in Regions One, Two and Seven. The work entails child sexual abuse as well as gender-based violence and therefore both children and adults are targeted.
In her report for last year, Dalgety-Dean said, “the levels of sexual and gender-based violence also saw an alarming increase which saw our migrant support staff on the ground in the field every day”.
The 2020 report indicated that some 373 forensic interviews were conducted with children who are victims of child abuse, 16 extended/further forensic interviews were conducted, and 7 forensic interviews were conducted with special victims who suffered from sexual violence and exploitation.
And in the Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Psychosocial Support area, some 245 referrals were received from the Child Care and Protection Agency, 304 emergency in-person sessions were provided for children and families and there were 1,721 weekly tele-psychosocial support sessions done with children and their families.
Finance
Dalgety-Dean was born in Guyana but left Queen’s College for England when her older sister was going off to university. She completed her A-Levels in that country at an all girl’s Catholic school.
According to Dalgety-Dean, her background is in finance. While reading for a political degree, she worked with children in London, England, volunteering at a children’s after-school club.
“Every single holiday period I ended up working with children. I worked with children with autism… it [working with children] was kind of there in the background and it was my go-to to earn pocket money [while attending university],” she said.
After university, Dalgety-Dean said, she was still unclear as to what she wanted to do, and she decided to apply to a few graduate management programmes; she landed in the Marks & Spencer graduate programme.
It entailed her doing two months of financial management, two months of commercial management and two months of personal financial management before specializing in one of the areas.
“It just so happened that I was actually good at the financial management, so I said this is what I am good at let me specialize in that… What that meant is if you needed to progress, you have to do some kind of account or financial qualification,” she recalled.
She later did a programme through the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants while she worked at another company as a financial analyst and later changed jobs to become a marketing financial analyst. However, at some point during her studies she stopped in her tracks as she realized that she did not want to become an accountant.
“I just stopped. I just ensured that I had enough money to live on for six months and I just stopped… I needed to regroup,” she recalled.
At that point, she realized that she wanted to work with children but did not want to be a social worker and so she registered with social work agencies as a professional and was called for an interview.
The project was the Building Bridges with the Family Welfare Association, now known as Family Action, which an international charity in England. She was shocked that she got the job and was later told that she was hired because of her financial background as they could not manage the funding effectively. They wanted someone with a financial background as well as one in working with children.
“I took to that job like a duck to water. It was to manage a project for children and families that were affected by mental [health problems] so what that entailed was to manage special and language therapist, doctors, nurses, paediatricians all of whom offered a multi-disciplinary approach…,” she said.
She managed the overall project but later got somewhat intimidated by all the professionals who worked under her and she had a “politics degree which is not like a specialist degree”. This saw her returning to university where she did a post graduate degree in systemic family therapy and it was there she found her calling.
She later moved on to run children centres that employed a multi-disciplinary approach to deal with children living in difficult circumstances.
When she later married, she decided to become a stay-at-home mother and her husband landed a job in Guyana, which meant she also returned to the land of her birth. It was her idea to home school her children, but she soon realized that she was not cut out for that. She joined the Inner Wheel Club and hung out with the older ladies, which, she said, was the way to go as they helped her to understand so much. Their average age was 70 and she was in her early 30s, but it is an experience she would not mind reliving.
Now that she has founded Blossom, even though funding remains a challenge, Dalgety-Dean said, it is here to stay. She did say that Blossom is a subvention agency of the government, but while there is a baseline to begin with she is constantly stressed with regard to funding. She has also learnt to be reluctant about accepting funding from privately-owned family businesses because she does not want to ever be placed in the position where she is expected to compromise the professionalism of Blossom in anyway.
Emerge BPO Call Centre gives a monthly support which is used to assist with giving staff petty cash to travel and provide snacks for them when they are out in the fields.