Concerned about growing personal and social dysfunction in society, officials have announced that they have embarked on several missions aimed at facilitating more social and emotional learning to combat this issue.
In fact, officially launching the Caribbean Institute for Social and Emotional Learning (CISEL) on Saturday, Feb. 5, founder and chairman Toney Olton said the mission was to facilitate the emotional intelligence development of some 500,000 Caribbean citizens by 2035 to help combat various social ills.
CISEL is being introduced through EQ Barbados, an emotional intelligence awareness and development organization, which was started April 19, 2019.
Addressing the online launching ceremony, Olton said, “EQ Barbados was launched out of a concern for the growing evidence of personal, interpersonal and social dysfunction in our society and to facilitate the noble goal of having 50,000 Barbadians practicing emotional intelligence by 2025.”
Officials noted that while the target was to train some 500 individuals locally in the practice of emotional intelligence and then have each of “them taking responsibility for enabling 100 persons in the development of their own emotional intelligence,” that goal was surpassed.
Training has been extended outside of Barbados to include participants from the rest of the region and beyond. In the summer of 2019, the CISEL facilitated training for some 260 educators in Barbados and by March 2020 it had facilitated four face-to-face emotional intelligence cohorts.