NEW YORK (JIS), January 04, 2008: Jamaican Irwine Clare, Sr., an Immigration Rights Advocate, is among a number of past students from Community Colleges in Jamaica who will be honoured at the Annual Conference of the Council of Community Colleges of Jamaica (CCCJ) at the Sunset Jamaica Grande Resort, Ocho Rios, on Tuesday, January 8, 2008.

Clare, Sr., who is a graduate of the York Castle High School and nearby Brown’s Town Community College (BTCC), will be presented with the 2007 Outstanding Alumnus Award for BTCC.

Each year, the CCCJ recognizes an outstanding alumnus from each of its member Community Colleges at its annual retreat.

Clare, Sr., who currently resides in New York City with his wife and two children, is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of the Queens (NY) based Caribbean Immigrant Services (CIS), an organization dedicated to the empowerment of Caribbean nationals in the Diaspora through informed presentations on immigration and socio-political issues.

His consistent advocacy for and on behalf of the New York Caribbean community has made him a sort after speaker and a frequent guest on the many radio and television programmes supporting the immigrant community throughout metro New York.

Since 1995, he has assisted thousands of residents to become citizens but perhaps the biggest feather in his cap might be that of Team Jamaica Bickle (TJB), the charitable unit he assembled more than a decade ago, to better provide for the hundreds of student/athletes from Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean region, attending the prestigious Penn Relays Carnival in Track & Field Athletics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Contacted by JIS NEWS/NY, Clare said that he was “quite humbled by this award and in accepting it, I must say thanks to those who made the decision and (more) importantly recognized two persons who were very critical in accepting me at the College, namely Ambassador Burchell Whiteman and Dorothy McKendrick, my surrogate parents. I will be forever grateful and pledge to continue to support the endeavours of the Community College system in Jamaica,” he said.