EmpowerU and SIVLL Society Are Building Something for Sint Maarten — And It's Already Live

Sint Maarten has never lacked for talented, driven people. What it has lacked — for too long — is locally made, freely available content that speaks to those people in their own voice, about the things that actually shape a life.

That's what EmpowerU and SIVLL Society Foundation set out to build together. The result is BABA: Becoming a Better Ancestor — a video and workshop series designed for Sint Maarten's youth and wider community, grounded in the belief that the island's people deserve the same quality of lifelong learning content that anywhere else in the world takes for granted.

Season 1 is live. Four videos. Four conversations. All free, all on YouTube, all made here.

Why this partnership exists

EmpowerU and SIVLL Society come from different angles, but they're aiming at the same thing.

SIVLL Society Foundation is a Sint Maarten-based organization deeply rooted in the island — its culture, its community, its future. SIVLL identified a real gap: outside of formal schooling, there's almost no locally specific, freely accessible content addressing the aspects of wellbeing that formal education doesn't cover. Mental health. Financial literacy. How to actually learn. How to care for the people around you. The curriculum doesn't teach this. Someone had to.

EmpowerU brings funding, strategic support, and diaspora perspective. Based in the US, EmpowerU has always understood that supporting Caribbean communities means more than writing scholarship checks — it means investing in the infrastructure that makes a whole community stronger. A partnership with an organization doing the on-the-ground work in Sint Maarten is exactly the kind of collaboration EmpowerU was built to support.

Together, the two organizations entered this pilot season with a shared intention: to learn together, build trust, and create something that can grow. Not a one-off project. A foundation.

What BABA actually is

BABA: Becoming a Better Ancestor is built around a simple but powerful question — what kind of ancestor do you want to be? Not in an abstract sense, but in the daily, practical sense: what are you doing today that will matter for the people who come after you?

The program runs on two tracks. The first is a YouTube series — short videos (5 to 10 minutes each) featuring local and diaspora experts speaking directly to the Sint Maarten community on topics that rarely get serious, accessible treatment on the island. The second is an in-person workshop program, delivered at local schools and youth programs, where high school students engage with the video content through facilitated discussion, using curriculum and guides developed alongside the series.

The goal isn't just to inform. It's to build what the project plan calls a "mindset of possibility" — the kind of foundational thinking that helps young people navigate whatever comes next, in Sint Maarten or anywhere in the world.

Season 1: Four speakers, four conversations

Season 1 brought together four experts — each with deep roots in the Caribbean or diaspora — to open the conversations that BABA is built around. Here's who spoke:

Ep	Speaker	Background	Topic
1	Jonathan van Arnemen	Somatic Psychotherapist, R-DMT, LAPC	What Is Mental Health?
2	Ashma Berkel	Founder & Director, Leaders for Change	Lessons in Community Care
3	Kyeisha Laurence	MD + Public Policy Candidate, Harvard	Learn How to Learn
4	Angelique Remy	CFEI, Financial Strategist & Educator	Where Your Money Mindset Comes From

Four topics that formal education rarely touches. Four people who have lived the questions they're answering. Each video is free, publicly available, and made for Sint Maarten — though the conversations are relevant to Caribbean communities everywhere.

What this is building toward

Season 1 is a pilot. The explicit goal from the start has been to build a model — one that can grow into a more robust after-school program, expand to other islands, and eventually establish a train-the-trainer framework so that the facilitation capacity lives in the community, not just in two organizations.

That's what "becoming a better ancestor" means in practice. Not a one-time event, but a system that keeps producing better conditions for the people who come after.

EmpowerU and SIVLL are building that system together, one season at a time.

Season 1 is on YouTube now. Watch all four episodes at youtube.com/@SIVLLSociety — and read the individual episode breakdowns on the EmpowerU blog.

Watch BABA Season 1: youtube.com/@SIVLLSociety · Learn more about EmpowerU: empoweru.online