7 News Belize

Ace Reporter Recognized For Child Friendly Reporting
posted (November 25, 2019)
The National Committee for Families and Children along with its partners hosted the first ever National Children's Awards on Friday night. The award ceremony was one of several events commemorating the 30th anniversary of the signing of the convention on the rights of the child. There were seven categories including a media category for excellence in child friendly reporting and our very own Courtney Weatherburne did it again and came in first with her story on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children. The Information, Education and Communication officer for NCFC Ava Diaz Sosa told us more about the significance of this award ceremony.

Ava Diaz Sosa, IEC Officer, NCFC
"Along with our partners because this was a collaborative effort, we decided to recognize children in 7 categories and it is different from the youth awards because this children's award was geared towards children 5 to 17 and looking at the different areas so we looked at business, community service, science and technology and agriculture, as I said 7 areas, we put out the call and ask for organizations and individuals to nominate children in these particular areas."

"There are children who have been doing extremely well in different areas and that is one of the things we found out when we reviewed some of the submissions, in fact we had submissions right across the country."

"Our goal is to make Belize the best place to raise our children and we found out that we have a number of NGO's who have been doing excellent work in terms of looking at the well being of children and so we wanted to recognize those as well and so Hope Haven out of San Pedro won the award for NGO and of course we cant forget the media because if we want to get our message out the media is the most effective way to do that and so we also had a media award and we invited the media house right across the country to submit a story having to do with children because as we said it has been 30 years since the signing, it has not all been a smooth road, of course there are gaps and challenges and so we wanted them to look at that and to see where we are and where we need to go and so in the media competition of course Courtney Weatherburne from Channel 7 placed first who placed second and the consolation prize went to Kevin Avilez from PGTV."

The children who received first place awards are Sonia Garcia from Trial Farm Village, Orange Walk for the Business category, Dayana Marroquin from Belize City for Science and Technology, Steve Martinez from San Joaquin Village, Corozal District for Agriculture, Kenly Martinez from San Ignacio for Community Service and Zaira Rodriguez from Belmopan for Arts and Culture. These winning kids all received a plaque and a tablet each. 2nd and 3rd place finishers received prizes as well. NCFC hopes to make this national children's awards an annual event.

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