Bajan government awards honorary consul
Juliette Gooding-Michelin with Prime Minister of Barbados Freundel Stuart
(CNS Local Life): Juliette Gooding-Michelin, Honorary Consul to Barbados in the Cayman Islands, was honoured in her home country on Wednesday, 11 January at an official awards ceremony hosted by the Governor General of Barbados. She received the Honour of the Gold Crown of Merit for promoting Barbados and her humanitarian efforts.
She was appointed Honorary Consul to Barbados in the Cayman Islands in 1995 enabling her to serve the Barbadian community through that office.
As part of her focus on humanitarian causes, she has trained in the medical management of disasters and crisis management.
On moving to the Cayman Islands, after studying in the UK, she joined the Department of Education prior to becoming the first director of the Cayman Islands 9-1-1 Emergency – Public Safety Department. After 12 years in this role she was selected as project coordinator to the Turks and Caicos Islands government, where she established their 9-1-1 centre and implemented an island-wide emergency radio communications structure and system.
During her years in Turks and Caicos, Gooding-Michelin took two young girls under her wing and provided them with guidance and counselled them. She assisted with textbooks for school, monitored their homework – awarding them for good grades – and said she would have loved to have been able to adopt those children.
Gooding-Michelin is a member and instructor of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials and trained the earlier team of Cayman Islands 9-1-1 dispatchers but now teaches customer service skills, 9-1-1 dispatch and disaster response to emergency service personnel overseas. She provides critical incident stress debriefing to law enforcement officers overseas when called upon.
She is the founding member of the Barbados Overseas Association in the Cayman Islands, formed in 1990, becoming its first president, and has helped raise funds for various humanitarian and educational needs. She regularly seeks donations from businesses and Barbadian/Caymanians, to provide food, Christmas gifts, clothing or other assistance to persons in need, particularly families with young children in the two countries.
Gooding-Michelin was also amongst the first members of the board of directors of Cayman Against Substance Abuse and was an instructor of the Parent-to-Parent Programme.
She shares her Barbadian culture with the Cayman community and encourages travel to her native island so that visitors experience its heritage firsthand.
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