birdsong’s 43-year struggle for security of tenure is scheduled to reach a head at any time now when the High Court order in respect of Civil Complaint No. CVC2015-01075 will be executed. The court order empowers our landlord to evict the organization and demolish the structures on the site – thereby effectively disrupting the operations of our very successful community-based music education programme which has so far provided the opportunities for more than 1,000 young people to access formal music education over the last 12 years.
As part of our continuing programme of documenting this occasion, birdsong extends an invitation to all community and non-government organizations, trade unions, steelbands, musicians, artistes and parents and guardians, to join us in solidarity at birdsong Operation Code Red, a town meeting to be held at our panyard at the corner of St. Vincent & Connell Streets in Tunapuna at 7.00 pm on Monday August 29, 2016. The major objective of Operation Code Red will be to inform the national community of the implications of the execution of the High Court order for the eviction of birdsong from the premises that we have occupied for the last 28 years.
The execution of this court order will climax more than 30 years of requests, pleadings, meetings, third party interventions and all other forms of civil communication aimed at resolving the issue of a secure home base for the organization’s activities. Over this 30 year period, we have engaged every Minister of Culture and every parliamentary representative for Tunapuna. The imminent descent of bulldozers and armed agents of the state on our premises will be the only tangible outcome of our well documented efforts to convince successive political administrations of the benefits of supporting a constructive, self-reliant community service delivery model at the front end as opposed to spending billions on the police, the army, the prisons and the court systems at the back end.
We seek no handouts. Self-sufficiency is at the core of our value system and our resource mobilization efforts involve limited recourse to state agencies. Our business activities finance our core activities and our special projects have received support from a host of local and international agencies including the UNDP, the IDB, the JB Fernandes Trust managed by the Rockefeller Foundation and United Way. As part of our engagement with these agencies, our programmes routinely come under independent professional scrutiny and we regularly receive strong endorsements for accountability, relevance and the creativity of our approach to empowering the next generation of Trinidad & Tobago’s musicians.
Replies