Humble beginnings

Our story begins on a dusty hilltop road in rural. St.Elizabeth, Jamaica, where Doc E.B. maneuvers his way in a old rental car up and over potholes after fixing a flat tire in the arid Jamaican draught season. In the passenger side is his bagged peanut butter and jelly sandwich, carefully positioned on top of four laminated colored signs. They read “Observation,” “Regulation,” “Meditation” and “Compassion.”

He is on his way to pick up his dear sister friend and fellow minister, Jahlah, and it is their first day ever working with the youth of St. Elizabeth in B.B.Coke secondary school, St. Elizabeth. They have a curriculum of self-regulation and resilience mapped out with various activities that have worked with Doc E.B in the past, but he has never been in a Jamaican school. What would happen in the next three days would change his ministry forever and reassure him that there is hope for young people in a world that wants to distract them and even destroy them.

These first days of the pilot program at B.B.Coke, where a small group of student ambassadors volunteered to learn about “leadership through mindfulness,” subsequently birthed an idea. The activities the followed and the conversations among the ambassadors that transpired altered the perception of themselves, each other, their own abilities and the role that they could play as change makers in their own school community. It was the birth of Inner Tech —-a new technology activating the “inner worlds” of young people.