TUCO seeks corporate help

Trinbago Unified Calypsonians’ Organisation (TUCO) president Lutalo Masimba, aka Brother Resistance, says the organisation is seeking partnership with corporate TT to have more independence from government allocations.

He was speaking with Sunday Newsday yesterday at the Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain during a TUCO event to discuss a medical plan for its members.

Masimba said TUCO has not heard anything about the government allocation as yet and that would fall under the National Carnival Commission (NCC) and the government.

“We hope that they would understand that Carnival is now.”

He said the board of the NCC was recently installed and that would be a major keep back.

“So we have to work with the NCC with that understanding that things now come in place and so the board would need to get a feel of where they are and get things in place for moving forward.”

He said they are always hopeful of a good allocation but they do not depend on it in spite of what people may say. “We have always been trying to establish new relationships especially out in the corporate world, in the finance world, and to begin to move our product into a more public/private sector partnership. We think that is important. We don’t feel comfortable waiting on the government to see what the government give we (sic).”

He said TUCO has always been making moves to establish new situations where they could embrace relationships with the corporate and financial sectors to take their product to another space. Masimba said he believes government funding should be specifically for developmental purposes and growing the industry but for commercial events they need to find a way to make them “speak for us.”

He said the outlook for this looks fairly good and TUCO will be making some announcements fairly soon.

“When we roll out what we doing for Carnival 2018 we want to show that in these critical times when dependence on the Treasury is not a major thing for us we want to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that we have been making some moves to establish a sense of independence as we good forward.

During his address to members, Masimba said the establishment of a medical plan was a long sought after dream for the organisation. He recalled they approached a number of insurance companies but those plans were not pursued.

He said TUCO also started a “legacy” programme where they have money to bury members instead of having t pass a hat but with the requests for tents, “shiny” coffins and fancy programmes they used up all the money on two funerals. He said instead they devised a welfare policy to support the family of the late member in their time of bereavement and work with the Social Development Ministry welfare department to help the family through the situation and if they had no money to collect they would handle the funeral expenses.

He said TUCO decided to implement a “home-grown” health plan for members via GH Healthcare Consultants and they will be facilitating members seeing about their health through discounts and eventually an emergency number and access to private hospitals on an emergency basis.