15 officers from the Police Department and Conscious Youth Development Program – CYDP are participating in a two day workshop on case management and how to effectively engage young people. It sounds like just another a talk shop but the facilitator Dr. Carolyn Gentle-Genitty – a Belizean professor of social work at Indiana University – told us why the skills are important.

Dr. Carolyn Gentle-Genitty, Facilitator
“To be able to go out there to the community members and say I am willing to make a change. I am willing to sit down with this individual, do goal setting, have proper case management, be able to identify specific goals within a specific timeframe, and deliver products.”

Edward Broaster, CYDP Director
“The skills that are being enhanced for us today are very very important because we need to understand how we need to deal with criminals and how we are to gain trust and defend them and to work with them.”

Dr. Carolyn Gentle-Genitty,
“In the past we had programs where a lot of people from all different areas are offering you programs but we’ve never brought them all together to have a comprehensive service delivery system, we have never had a full documentation of the process, and talk about the impact that we have made with the dollar spent and if we can do a good job with that by today starting with having at least a cadre of 24 more individuals knowledgeable about the case management process and goal setting and creating those impacts, I believe we would have at least started the process to that change.”

The workshop concludes tomorrow. As we mentioned in the introduction to the story – Dr. Carolyn Gentle Genitty is a professor of social work at Indiana University. She is a Belizean and her first job in Belize was coincidentally at CYDP. She also worked at the YMCA prior to leaving to obtaining her doctorate.