HELPING
Janice Hall Founder & Chair
Janice Hall returns to her roots By Tara Ryazansky Photos courtesy of We Are GUTSY
B
ayonne real estate agent Janice Hall is gutsy. She’s determined to help kids no matter what. Hall is founder of We Are GUTSY. “I know gutsy means a lot of things to a lot of people, but to us it’s always in caps,” Hall says. “It stands for Guyanese United to Serve our Youth. Our mission is to foster the wellbeing of children, through coaching and mentoring, so they can develop civic minded attitudes and behavior, so they can become positive citizens of Guyana.” That’s where Hall is from. She moved from Guyana to Bayonne in 2000. She founded We Are Gutsy in 2018. In 2019 she gathered approximately 40 teachers, social workers, and parents in Guyana for training in We Are GUTSY techniques. “We sat them down, and we did training in core values like strength and integrity and honesty,” Hall says. They then bussed the caregivers along with 160 kids ages 3-12 for a weeklong pilot program. Hall says it was a huge success, though the pandemic caused the organization to pivot and provide resources online only for now. She plans to return to Guyana next year. “It’s only COVID that stops me.”
Seeds are Sown Hall says that she saw a need for the organization because of the high rates of child neglect reported by Guyana’s Child Care and Protection Agency.
38 • BLP ~ SPRING | SUMMER 2021
Guyana Kids Get Coping Skills
Children participate in the first workshop in Guyana. “When a child is neglected in those formative years, they do not develop the ability to cope with life,” Hall says. “They have to cope with growing up in order to succeed in school, in the workplace, in relationships, and in life. That’s why I founded this organization.” To help children you have to help their parents. “There are many socioeconomic factors that contribute to this,” Hall says. “We’re not saying they’re bad caregivers, or they’re bad parents, we’re saying they just need help,” Hall says. “A lot of them don’t know it.”
In mid-April, We Are GUTSY led an online workshop for parents. “We were discussing parenting styles,” she says. “We asked them what parenting style they thought they had. There are four parenting styles mainly: permissive, authoritarian, authoritative and uninvolved. Almost everyone thought they were authoritative, which is ‘Let’s discuss it’. By the end of the discussion when we showed them what these styles meant, almost all of them realized that they were authoritarian, ‘Do this because I say so.’ That’s how I grew up.”
