About
Beneficiaries
Descendants
Descendants describes those descended from the enslaved persons that work the Codrington plantations before their emancipation in 1834. USPG & The Codrington Trust acknowledge that the spread of such descendants will be global in nature, and will work to identify and engage such descendants in the project through the appointment of a Director of Family Research, who will also take responsibility for assisting potential descendants in tracing their connections to the Codrington estate. Ultimately, the project will seek to relocate essential archival materials from the UK to Barbados to establish an open-access Family Research Centre, allowing both local residents as well as members of the diaspora to trace their ancestry.
To guide its work with descendant communities, the project team will work to implement the guidelines of the ICCROM Toolkit for Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites.
Communities of St. John
This beneficiary group consists of those residing on the Codrington estate, many of whom also rent their land from the Codrington Trust. As referenced in Project Pillar C, the project will see these tenants receive the opportunity to have their land transferred to them from the Codrington Trust, allowing them to own the land they reside on and pass it down to their own descendants. Besides the transfer of land tenantries to tenants, the project hopes to provide opportunities to local residents in need of economic, academic or professional support, especially those residing in St. John. A range of scholarships and business endowment opportunities are in development, and are planned to begin in 2025, the second year of project activity.
Nation of Barbados and the Wider Caribbean
While the two above groups comprise the core beneficiaries and target groups which the project work seeks to benefit, the project also seeks to benefit the wider nation of Barbados and the Caribbean as a whole in a range of areas. Virtually all of the project’s BBD18 million / £7m will be spent in the local Barbadian economy, partnering wherever possible with local businesses and service providers to stimulate work opportunities while delivering its core aims. While its scholarships and business empowerment schemes will concentrate first on the area of St. John as the core beneficiaries of the project, these schemes are planned to reach the entire island later in the project cycle.
Investment in the Barbadian economy, the empowerment of its people and the delivery of reparative justice on Caribbean soil, hoping to provide a model and example of international reparative justice between organisations of former imperial powers and the sites which they impacted.
