The People's Constitution Commission is the body made up of 23 stakeholders representing a wide array of groups, responsible for starting the process of overhauling Belize's constitution to make it a document more reflective of the times we are living in.
And if you don't really know much about the work of the PCC, or who the commissioners are, they'll be launching a Public Education and Outreach Strategy. And today, a workshop was held to orient the commissioners and the media on the steps that will be taken to engage the wider public.
Today, the chairman, Anthony Chanona, told us more.
Anthony Chanona, Chairman, PCC
"Since our formation, I guess the biggest challenge was trying to manage the personalities of 23 organizations, took a little time, but we kept at it, we took a little longer than we needed than what was expected from December to February before we adopted our strategic plan and then going forward into understanding the rules, getting orientation on the different methodologies of constitutionalism. This is all new to us but we finally have now, we've reached the point where we have a draft public outreach strategy because unlike Jamaica and Barbados, we have adopted the strategy of going into a public education exercise for four months using the school system, using the citizen survey, starting at the base, the people, we'll be calling for papers from within the organization so in a sense, we have taken seven months to assess our base, we now feel we have gained the institutional camaraderie to begin to work as a team into now the public outreach, given the knowledge we've had over the last seven months."
"What will be launched tomorrow, we have lecture series with Professor Destro and that's a closed, it's going to be streamed, it's going to be able to be placed in the media, but it's a private, you see, we have 23 stakeholders and the church being one of them has asked for collaboration in getting Professor Destro to present this document to the teachers. The main focus is using the education system because that's the common denominator across the country, it's in every district and town, even as far as Graham Creek has a primary school, so we are not going to begin by asking the people what they want to change in the constitution, the citizen survey is going to have the people respond, what are the issues that are troubling them or what could make their country better but where do we begin? We'll begin by establishing what do we have as a base, what are the views of the people regarding their country, their institution, and based on their response, which we're going to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Statistical Institute of Belize to be able to analyze the data and to say the people of Belize are thinking about their judiciary, they're thinking about their public health, their lack of public service, delivery of document, etc, and then we begin to orient the people of Belize around those thematic areas in the constitution. So the strategy is assessing the base by citizen survey, that will be by soft launch using blast media platforms of the telephone communication database and then in September when the schools back in then we drive that into the school system and to be able to get at least 350,000 responses on where we are as a nation, based on that response, then we go into the public consultation, which then begins October to February."
