Joe Issa Wishes Happy Valentine’s Day, Good Education for All Jamaican Children

Civic-minded philanthropist and businessman Joe Issa, wishes his employees, business colleagues and friends a Happy Valentine’s Day while promoting a good education for all Jamaican children, stating “it is the surest way out of poverty – the scourge of all societies.”

Issa cautioned that “while numeracy and literacy have their uses, such as in functionality – enabling one to follow directions, dispense medicine, cook from recipes and apply agricultural or other chemicals – it is woefully inadequate to take one beyond the ‘bread line’.”

He argues that “sometimes, depending on how enabling the business environment is and the size of the household, more is needed, such as a good education, creativity and imagination, or even retraining, in order to break completely, the cycle of poverty.”

Issa said he chose ‘a good education’ as his thematic Valentine’s Day message not simply because it is the area in which his Cool Group subsidiary, Cool Charities, gives back to disadvantaged children.

As he puts it, “a good education not only opens up opportunities for gainful employment in order to provide for the basic necessities of daily living such as food, clothing and shelter, but it also prepares one to change one’s life entirely by making poverty a distant phenomenon.”

He describes a good education as one that does not merely enable school leavers to get a decent entry level job, but one which allows them to matriculate to higher education such as a college or university, and get a profession.

In 1987, while at the Londoon School of Economics, Issa founded his first charity, “Educate the Children Fund”, to buy books for disadvantaged children in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean; and a year later, he established the “Joe Issa/Holy Cross Scholarship Fund” to send bright, under-privileged students to his alma mater university in the United States.

He has hosted youth camps and disadvantaged children in the St Ann/St Mary area in which his businesses operate, and believes that schools must be progressive in order to churn out university-ready children.

It was with this in mind that he founded “Global Education 2000”, which has twined Jamaican schools with their counterparts in the United States. Several schools have benefited from these exchanges, including Three Hills All Age School in St. Mary, which was twinned with Broward Elementary School in Tampa, Florida.

Issa has described the results of the initiative as “a major development which will see an exciting, rewarding exchange of cultural ideas and thoughts between students and teachers at both institutions.”

He says much of who he is today, is due to his good fortune of having had a good education, and stated, “I wish nothing less for all Jamaican children.”