A HALF-DAY seminar next month to explore Jersey’s identity will draw to a close public engagement on what makes the Island unique.
The project, led by the Island Identity Policy Development Board and launched last spring, led to the publication of a 200-page report last year supported by recommendations to help ‘preserve and enhance what’s best about Jersey’.
Following a further programme of engagement with minority groups to probe barriers and challenges to inclusivity, participants in the project are being invited to a concluding event on 15 February to be opened by the Bailiff, Timothy Le Cocq.
David Goodhart, the former founder and editor of Prospect magazine, now head of the Demography, Immigration and Integration unit for the UK’s Policy Exchange think-tank, and creative strategist Jenny Andersson will give presentations, and the board’s chairwoman, International Development Minister Carolyn Labey, will make the keynote address at the event organised by the Jersey Policy Forum.
Deputy Labey said that she hoped that the results of the discussion – taking the form of a report commissioned from the Jersey Policy Forum which is expected to go to the Council of Ministers in April – ‘would then go forward for the next government to pick up’.
‘Obviously, we have already made recommendations in our report and have gone out to relevant government departments and arms-length-organisations to encourage them to work with us and take them on,’ she said, adding that outcomes already included a series of children’s books on Island history and culture, website resources that could be used as a tool by schools and newcomers to the Island and identity design recommendations for Ports of Jersey.
Attendance at the event on 15 February at the Radisson Blu by invitation only is limited to 150 people who have already engaged with the project but Deputy Labey said that those wishing to make any further comment were welcome to do so. ‘We are always asking for feedback through the website’, she said.
