56 churches in Hanover received their slice of the $75-million Community Church Clean-up allocation after Minister of Local Government and Community Development, Hon Desmond McKenzie handed over checks amounting to $8.4 million Friday morning (June 5, 2026).
This, after the government made a commitment last December to provide churches in the five most affected parish with grants to assist them with undertaking post-hurricane Melissa repairs.
In his address at the ceremony, Minister McKenzie underlined the importance of supporting churches crediting the Local government system to the early church.
“We can’t separate the state from the churches” said Minister McKenzie as he reminisced on the inception of the Local Government fraternity immerging from the vestry system.
“A lot of our church halls was used as shelters and there are still churches today, that is assisting us by using their facilities to continue to house and to provide for persons who are waiting for permanent replacement” he added.
Meanwhile, Minister of State in the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development, Hon. Delroy Williams, further added that the value of the church must never be undermined, as the body continues its job of restoration and community-based first responders.
“The many roles of the church within communities is critical… The churches play a major role in response and in restoration, and I am not talking about responding to their own issues as churches and restoring churches, but they play a major role in the restoration of community life” he said.
“The issue of ensuring that we have responders or response teams or response capabilities within communities that is an important aspect of our resilience infrastructure. Within communities across this country there are local community based responders that will assist in the event of a disaster and we believe that the churches can play, and will play a major role in assisting the government, the Ministry of Local
Government in creating this cadre of volunteers, this cadre of first responders in the event of disasters that are community based” Minister Williams said.
This partnership between the government and the churches comes, as the administration is looking to move away from using educational institutions as shelters in the face of another disaster.
This grant handover ceremony is the second of five such event geared towards assisting churches with minor rehabilitative work following the passage of Hurricane Melissa.
