Richmond Vale Academy

Richmond Vale Academy trains activists with collective abilities to fight poverty and improve the environment. In the programs at Richmond Vale Academy, we tackle life-important subject matters. That is why we are passionate about what we do. Half of the people on this Earth belong to the ranks of the poor, meaning that every day is a struggle to find water, food and shelter, get a job, send one's children to school and avoid preventable, yet often fatal, diseases. Global Warming and Climate Change is also running its course, with catastrophic consequences for the future of humankind and our planet, triggered by man's burning of fossil fuels and the resulting release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Natural resources are being exploited and stretched to their limits, species are disappearing at a rate never before seen in modern history, hunger, starvation and diseases strike down the poor as a daily matter of course, and the powers waging never-ending wars kill people with ever more sophisticated weaponry, while millions are made refugees. Meanwhile, the capitalist system of society continues to promote its way of life and its view of the world as seen through the global media, as if everything, if not in the best order, is as good as it can possibly get. We cannot sit around and watch this. From our vantage point on the island of St. Vincent in the Eastern Caribbean, we have placed ourselves in the middle of action. We, the teachers and students at the school, carry through programs training ourselves to work as activists, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the poor and studying and creating local defense systems against Global Warming and Climate Change. We bring what we learn to the Public, informing and mobilizing people through books, films, radio programs, debates, exhibitions, street theater, lessons in primary schools and the Internet. At Richmond Vale Academy, we live a collective life in an international environment, with teachers and participants from many different countries and with a multitude of different backgrounds, beliefs, cultures, skills, languages and education. Sharing life and work in this setting with its challenges, necessities and important subject matters constitutes an excellent training in and of itself. We are forced to solve the conflicts that arise within the team. We learn to speak out and contribute constructively to get things done. We learn to focus on reaching the goals we set, while living and working as part of a collective effort with others from different parts of the world. Richmond Vale Academy's programs are challenging. We foster the discovery and great pleasure or achieving common goals with a team, and realizing how much more can be achieved when people work together. The life at Richmond Vale Academy is simple in many ways. We live at the end of the road in the 2nd poorest nation in the Caribbean, very far from the consumer society of shopping, restaurants and bars. So we produce our own culture and entertainment, and a lot of creativity follows. Working together with people at the school and in St. Vincent and fighting with The Poor in Latin America moves our participants. From morning until night, we are involved in issues important to life. We get to know much more about what is going on in the world through learning and experience. We learn a lot of new skills: practical skills, language skills, communication skills, presentation skills, and media production skills. At Richmond Vale Academy, we love practical work. Our teaching methods very practical so participants learn a lot simply by doing. Overall, we believe that humans can help other humans, as long as they make an effort to do so.