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St. Kitts and Nevis – 13 February 2026: “I don’t assume individuals merely don’t care about reparations; they haven’t been given sufficient data to actually perceive how reparations can positively affect their lives.” That is the assumption formed by greater than a decade of grassroots advocacy by Elsie Harry.
Elsie’s adolescence have been spent within the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis since migrating from Guyana at age 6. As a teen, she served as a youth parliamentarian and has since advocated on points affecting livelihoods, rooting her advocacy in nation-building. Now an City and Rural Planner, STEM Advocate, and a long-standing voice for youth and reparations in each St. Kitts and Nevis and Guyana, Elsie is pushed by a easy conviction: that individuals can’t be anticipated to have interaction totally with what they’ve by no means been given the instruments to perceive. That conviction now guides her work as a Neighborhood Organiser with The Restore Marketing campaign in St. Kitts and Nevis, the place her focus is on making reparations comprehensible and linked to on a regular basis realities.
The Youngest Individual within the Room
Elsie was invited to her first reparations assembly after returning to Guyana as an undergraduate scholar. Amidst a desk of individuals aged 50 to 70 years previous, she recalled being instructed, “You’re the younger particular person within the room, so you need to recruit younger individuals for the motion” and she or he adopted it as a mandate.
She rapidly realised, nonetheless, that many younger individuals have been overwhelmed by their personal challenges – unemployment, entry to schooling, residing bills, and day-to-day survival. “Naturally, bread and butter points needed to come first. Reparations couldn’t take precedence over getting a job and paying your payments.”
Relatively than stepping away from the work, Elsie adjusted her strategy, coupling conversations on reparations with mentorship, profession steerage, and sensible assist. Together with her new strategy, “younger individuals now had the psychological house” to perceive how reparations linked on to the situations they have been navigating. “We are able to’t depart it to probability that younger individuals will come into this work on their very own; if the motion goes to final, it has to deliberately make house for them,” she famous.
Making reparations comprehensible
For Elsie, grounding the dialog stays vital. “I embraced my African id from a younger age, largely due to my father,” she shared. He inspired her to learn the works of thought leaders like Walter Rodney and to grasp how Africa and the Caribbean have been intentionally underdeveloped. “By the point I used to be invited into the reparations dialog,” she mirrored, “I used to be already fertile soil.”
This data isn’t one thing most individuals are uncovered to rising up within the Caribbean, a actuality that now shapes her organising work with The Restore Marketing campaign. Elsie focuses on creating entry factors for brand new individuals by means of dialog, schooling, and shared studying, to assist construct a reparations motion that’s knowledgeable, inclusive, and sustainable in St. Kitts and Nevis.
Studying the panorama in St. Kitts and Nevis
“As an City and Rural Planner, I observe how land is used, and you’ll see how colonialism formed each side of our society,” shared Elsie. In St. Kitts and Nevis, these legacies are seen within the land itself, the place for hundreds of years sugar cultivation formed land use to serve colonial extraction reasonably than native wants. “When the sugar trade closed in 2005, it felt like our society was scrambling to cope with this main shift within the nation’s developmental trajectory.”
“None of this”, Elsie mirrored, “was chosen by the individuals most affected by it; this was inherited from colonialism. Reparations is about responding to these inherited techniques which can be nonetheless shaping our lives.”
Constructing a Collective
For weeks Elsie engaged with reparations stakeholders, together with Chairperson of the Nationwide Reparations Committee, Carla Astaphan, and neighborhood members as a part of her work with The Restore Marketing campaign. She introduced that work into the open by means of her first two occasions — one in St. Kitts on February 7 and one other in Nevis on February 10. “The intention of those occasions was merely to have a dialog on reparations,” Elsie famous. “I needed individuals to grasp what reparations is, what work has already been achieved, and the way they will take part as people.”
These conversations, she is obvious, are solely the start. “Reparations is not work that ought to solely be achieved by individuals who have made a profession out of reparations, it’s work that’s tied to our identities as a individuals. Subsequently, it’s everybody’s duty,” Elsie mentioned.
Her focus now could be on persevering with the work of schooling, advocacy, and relationship-building to strengthen a broad base of people who find themselves knowledgeable, organised, and able to assist political motion on reparations. For Elsie, that’s how a motion lasts: “Partaking individuals and constructing motion infrastructure. That’s the work.”
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Contact: Sheba Gifford, The Restore Marketing campaign, Tel: 876-879-5763, Electronic mail:shebagifford@repaircampaign.org
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