The Min­is­ter of Cul­ture and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, Michelle Ben­jamin, has af­firmed that vil­lage and com­mu­ni­ty coun­cils will ben­e­fit tremen­dous­ly from her min­istry’s ini­tia­tives de­signed to breathe new life in­to com­mu­ni­ties and en­sure their progress.

Min­is­ter Ben­jamin met this week with ex­ec­u­tive mem­bers of the Trinidad and To­ba­go As­so­ci­a­tion of Vil­lage and Com­mu­ni­ty Coun­cils (TTAVCC) to dis­cuss ways to im­prove lo­cal gov­er­nance and com­mu­ni­ty en­gage­ment.

Dur­ing the meet­ing, the min­is­ter an­nounced plans to in­crease ac­cess to new­ly formed Vil­lage Coun­cils, which are ex­pect­ed to be de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly in­stalled in the com­ing months. This move is part of a broad­er strat­e­gy aimed at re­vi­tal­is­ing com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment.

Ben­jamin stressed the im­por­tance of Vil­lage Coun­cils ad­her­ing to their by-laws, specif­i­cal­ly the re­quire­ment for An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ings as out­lined in the TTAVCC con­sti­tu­tion. She not­ed that these re­quire­ments are not ex­ter­nal­ly im­posed but are meant to up­hold the or­gan­i­sa­tion's own gov­er­nance stan­dards, en­sur­ing trans­paren­cy, ac­count­abil­i­ty, and ef­fec­tive ser­vice to com­mu­ni­ties.

She added that stronger in­ter­nal sys­tems and pro­ce­dur­al com­pli­ance will al­low Vil­lage Coun­cils to bet­ter ad­vo­cate for lo­cal de­vel­op­ment. A struc­tured, trans­par­ent ap­proach, she said, en­cour­ages col­lec­tive de­ci­sion-mak­ing and pre­vents any one per­son from dom­i­nat­ing the process.

Em­pha­sis was al­so placed on the need for open-door poli­cies that al­low res­i­dents to en­gage di­rect­ly with coun­cil lead­er­ship.

Oth­er mat­ters dis­cussed in­clud­ed the de­vel­op­ment of a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing be­tween the Min­istry and TTAVCC, the in­tro­duc­tion of youth-fo­cused ini­tia­tives such as Home­work Cen­tres, plans for quar­ter­ly meet­ings be­tween the or­gan­i­sa­tions, and the re­fur­bish­ment of ex­ist­ing com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres.