HISTORY
Where the Foundation came from.
A hotel built in 1994 on a commitment to its own community, a charity formally established in 2004, and two decades of work in and around Negril.
Since its establishment in 1994, Rockhouse Hotel has always been embedded in the community. Initially focused on projects in the inner city of Kingston, Jamaica’s capital city, assisting in the Victory Basic School, and most memorably, supporting the Trench Town Culture Yard.
However, in the early 2000s, the hotel turned its full attention to its own neighborhood, evolving ad hoc outreach, starting with a breakfast feeding program at Negril All Age School, and evolving into a formal, tax exempt vehicle to have more enduring and meaningful impact.
The Rockhouse Foundation was founded in 2004 as a New York based charity and IRS recognized 501(c)(3) with a broad mission of “transforming the places where Jamaican children learn and supporting the great people who teach them”. What started out as improvements to the physical infrastructure of public primary schools from 2004 to 2014…
… ultimately expanded into the transformation of schools through investments in additional services, like technology programs; personnel solutions for better student:teacher ratios; and feeding programs for free school breakfasts.
The journey now continues where the most impact is made: education itself. In 2017, the Foundation launched its most ambitious project to date with the development of the Sav Inclusive School: Jamaica’s first and only mixed ability, full inclusion model school in Westmoreland’s capital city, Savanna-la-Mar. Built from the ground up by the Foundation, Sav Inclusive has a full enrollment of 275 children, from infant to primary school now completed, with the high school expansion now fully underway.
July 2021
A path right through high school.
In July 2021 Jamaica's Minister of Education, Fayval Williams, and Rockhouse Foundation President Peter Rose (pictured) signed a new joint commitment to expand the Sav Inclusive school through to 12th grade. Currently educating students from pre-K to 2nd grade school, this new commitment means that each year for the next decade the Foundation will be adding a new grade so the current 2nd graders have a path right through high school. The understanding also includes additional adjoining lands allocated from the Catholic Church for construction of the expanded primary and high schools.
Monthly giving
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A standing gift is the steadiest kind. It pays for the things a school needs every month of the year: water, light, internet, lunch, and the teachers a public budget cannot stretch to.
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What the twenty years built.
The history explains how the Foundation got here. These pages show what it has to show for it.
The projects
Our work
One library, six schools, and the Sav Inclusive School, built from the ground up since 2017.
See the projectsThe people
Meet our leaders
The founders, the president and the board who have carried this from a breakfast program to a school.
Meet themThe receipts
Financial reports
The annual report, the auditor’s review and the Form 990, all of it public.
Read the reports
The next twenty years start this term.
Every gift goes straight into the schools and the teachers of Western Jamaica. The Foundation’s own running costs are covered by the hotels.
100% of your donation reaches the projects. Our overheads are underwritten by Rockhouse, Skylark and Miss Lily’s.