Foundation crying out for funds

FOUNDER and chairperson of the Care and Respect for Youth (CRY) Foundation, Lystra Penny, yesterday, announced that family values in Trinidad and Tobago have been tarnished and broken down and urged citizens to come together as one and have the issue addressed before it was too late. Penny was speaking to members of the media yesterday, at one of her home’s. (The Gracious House situated at Forres Park Claxton Bay) Open Day. She said there were many displaced children in society and it was because of the sort of incidents that go on in the home, including physical and sexual abuse.

Penny called on Prime Minister Patrick Manning to provide her home with a subvention. “This Claxton Bay home is too small, it only houses 16 children between the ages of five years and 16 and because of insufficient funding we are unable to provide a much larger place to accommodate the number of displaced children” she said. The Home is dedicated to providing care, protection and total development for youths. The CRY Foundation was founded in July 1993 out of Penny’s expressed care and concern for the growing number of socially dispossessed, orphaned and abused children in the country. Its mission statement is to develop and maintain as long as the need requires: an affective, efficiently run and prudently managed institution geared towards the local development of the children under its care and the happy reunion of children to family life with their parents or guardians where practicable.