Ascend07

For as long as I can remember, I gained insurmountable happiness from helping others. I didn't get much parental affection growing up and that lack I experienced has been channeled into my passion for improving circumstances for others in the most needed ways I can identify that will have a meaningful impact.

Many communities suffer in different ways, but the children and youth deserve a chance to access acceptable development support through a cleaner, positive environment, where their parents have access to basic tools to support that development.

If we are selected by the elevate prize, the funding will be used to scale our programs locally for more communities to be impacted and to expand these programs into other Caribbean countries through a developing benevolence network.

I envision charity as a way of life.

My Name is Darren Bent, founder of Ascend07. I am a Project manager, a mentor with the CARICOM Secretariat Youth Programme, and a Jamaican delegate for Mock COP 26.

Our goal is to transform marginalized communities into sustainable communities. Ascend07  spurred from another initiative in 2014 where we aimed to rehabilitate a community and had great success.

Ascend07 currently has 2 projects: 1. Climate adaptation program - which seeks to plant 10, 000 trees, create a climate change education campaign and advocate for access to weather and climate information from the weather in an understandable language to communities.

2. Youth homicide prevention program - This will create inner-city youth-led networks to break down inner-city community rivalries. - This is now being scaled in a wider community resilience program for ZOSO areas in Jamaica.

Our goals for the future are to realize more sustainable communities, to see greater synergies within charity groups, community charity information developed and structured for persons who need the information to access, to make volunteering an open opportunity for any interested for whatever time they have to contribute and to see marginalized community youths leading the charge for change in how they are perceived and treated.

There are many inner-city communities in Urban Jamaica, which are marginalized and characterized as poor and dangerous. Within these communities are the highest birthrates and also the most polluted areas in the country. The communities are typically enclosed and densely populated. This structure is quite similar in other Caribbean countries and therefore a similar model is applicable in other countries. 

Approximately 1.4 million people are affected locally but the number increase across other territories.

We are planting food trees for sustenance and air cleaning within marginalized communities, educating communities in an inclusive manner on climate change and practical solutions through 20-30 second audiovisual, providing access to relevant weather and climate information in a very understandable language, and developing youths in marginalized communities and connecting them in a codependent community growth network that will facilitate access to corporate resources.

Ascend07 is a Jamaica-based philanthropy organization that aims to transform marginalized communities into sustainable communities through collaboration with other community groups, government agencies, development agencies and members of the corporate community.

So far we have developed two task forces within 2 communities, planted 200 trees, donated 300 books, increased our network by 14 different organizations, and started collecting community-based data.

We acknowledge the importance of the role all of us play in civic development. What makes us different is our drive to normalize charity as a way of life by creating inclusive networks to facilitate continuous community development support and our comprehensive approach to creating alliances with charity groups to become more efficient and able.

ur primary approach was to talk with community members to find out what are the challenges they living in their domain. This was done to understand the needs of each community we visited.

That data has contributed to our goals since we are targeting as best as our resources allow, real challenges being faced within these domains.

Our current focus is to plant 2, 000 trees across Jamaica by the end of this year and the remaining 8,000 within the Caribbean by June 2022, to acquire funding and resources to create 40 educational videos to begin to simplify climate change into 20-30 second videos for the inner-city communities which contribute heavily to carbon emissions in the urban community (these videos will then be scale through government media platforms) and to provide for direct access to weather and climate information for these groups in a language that they can consume it.

This is effective because we are already building out the necessary partnerships and the solutions being created support specific problems identified within these targeted communities.