American Caribbean Maritime Foundation to host gala in Florida

Florida: The American Caribbean Maritime Foundation (ACMF) will host its fifth annual gala and Anchor Awards ceremony on Friday, November 4, at the Coral Ridge Yacht Club in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, under the theme ‘Educate, Inspire’.

Dr Irfaan Ali, president of the Republic of Guyana, will be patron of this year’s event, while Chairman of Kingston Wharves Jeff Hall will be a special guest at the awards function.

The gala and scholarship function will bring together a number of top officials in the shipping industry, including Eddie Gonzalez, president and CEO of Seaboard Marine.

“Our work in support of training future mariners and maritime professionals echoes what we do across the Caribbean region, and we are so delighted to be welcoming His Excellency, Guyana’s president, to this year’s Anchor Awards,” says ACMF President Dr Geneive Brown Metzger. She is also the former Jamaica consul general to New York.

Rick Murrell, president and CEO of Saltchuk Logistics, expressed his pleasure to serve as this year’s gala chairman, as well as to celebrate the accomplishments of the foundation.

The American Caribbean Maritime Foundation is a US non-profit, tax-exempt organisation, and the only entity dedicated to sponsoring academic scholarships and grants to students seeking to pursue a career in the maritime industry. It is the only organisation solely dedicated to sponsoring academic scholarships and grants for aspiring Caribbean and CARICOM seafarers.

The foundation partners with four academic institutions within CARICOM: Caribbean Maritime University in Jamaica; LJM Maritime Academy in The Bahamas; MatPal Marine Institute in Guyana; and the University of Trinidad and Tobago.

To date, the AMCF has funded 92 full tuition scholarships and grants for students from Jamaica, Guyana, The Bahamas, Barbados, St Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, Suriname, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada. The foundation has also donated dozens of laptops to help students study remotely.

PRIORITY SECTORS

Maritime transport is one of the priority sectors in the region to create jobs, alleviate poverty, build competitiveness, and unleash key economic drivers to transition the regional economy to growth.International transportation has long been recognised as one of the main drivers of development in achieving economies of scale, according to the foundation’s website. Jamaica and The Bahamas benefit from their intermediacy setting in the principal East-West global trade routes, which pass through the Panama Canal, upping the potential and opportunity for these two countries. Several ports in these two countries, in particular, have been able to take advantage of their geographical positions because of the ascendant hub-and-spoke network in global liner shipping.

Maritime top brass, including Andy Thorne, CEO, Kestrel Group; Jeff Fiser, CEO, Tropical Shipping; Mark Williams, CEO, and Jeff Hall, chairman of Kingston Wharves Ltd; Charles Gittens, CEO, Seacor Island Lines; and Tim Martin, vice-president, Tropical, are among those expected to attend the black-tie event.

Executives from the Caribbean Shipping Association and Shipping Association of Barbados, and ACMF scholarship recipients from Jamaica and Guyana, will also be in attendance.