The Sustainable Development Roundtable is an advisory body appointed by the Premier of Bermuda to ensure broad community representation and engagement to advance the island's sustainable development agenda. This makes our remit incredibly wide, spanning the three pillars of sustainability, including economic, social and environmental issues.

Recently, the SDRT focus has been on the family unit and how it can be strengthened. We know that strong families exist when: there are nurtured relationships, financial stability and supportive community systems. Maintaining families and, in turn, communities is a critical factor to Bermuda's social sustainability.

The level of family support received by young people, in particular, is related to a number of interconnecting social factors, such as academic attainment, participation in the labour market and involvement in anti-social behaviour.

Bermuda is at a delicate point today. There was an unprecedented level of violence and murder in 2009 (128 weapons offences, 38 of which were incidents of gun violence, 110 serious assaults and six murders) and this is a pattern that appears to be continuing this year. Meanwhile 53 percent of the unemployed in Bermuda are young men aged 16 to 24 years and nationally, 15 percent of the population have no formal educational qualifications.

At the same time, there are a number of signs that the family unit is being weakened in Bermuda. There has been an average of 217 divorces a year in Bermuda since 1991 and referrals to helping agencies for 'at risk' children have risen by more than 10 percent in the past three years. In addition, during these difficult economic times, families are facing financial challenges that threaten their solidarity and create additional stress. The number of people seeking financial assistance rose by a third in the past year, with up to 1,400 families now on some level of government assistance. Housing prices are a particular concern; they have almost tripled over the last 15 years with an average cost of $400,000 for a property in 1993 growing to $1.1 million in 2008. Our concern is that the breakdown of the family structure has widespread implications, not only for social cohesion but also for our economy.

As part of the Sustainable Development Roundtable's work to investigate this issue and to enable us to support and inform the Government in developing additional social policies, we organised a community discussion event recently to gather feedback from the community. The event was attended by over 50 members of the community, which I think is proof that this is an issue that resonates with the public. The event was a valuable exercise intended to explore, through small discussion groups, the need to nurture family relationships in Bermuda and how that sense of family can be achieved despite the challenges. A wealth of positive feedback was received from participants, who found the event empowering as well as a valuable opportunity to exchange ideas and share experiences constructively with a diverse group of people, where everyone's opinion was respected.

Suggestions made by attendees on how the family unit could be strengthened in Bermuda were wide-ranging and included developing a National Family Day, creating more opportunities for inter-generational activities, introducing family-friendly economic policies, encouraging public education on parenting and undertaking Government research to enable greater understanding of the needs and challenges related to families.

An important overarching recommendation that came out of our community consultation was for the development of a national strategy for young people and families. I am confident that this is something we can work towards.

In order to address the various challenges our community currently faces and to reverse the negative trends we are witnessing, we must be willing to collectively place more value on the family unit. It becomes critical for each of us to evaluate whether there exists sufficient "nurtured relationships", "financial stability", and "supportive community systems" within the family structures that we see every day. I believe that the Sustainable Development Roundtable has an instrumental role to play in facilitating cultural and systematic change to policies, programmes and practices to deliberately strengthen families and influence outcomes for future generations.

If you would like to be involved in this work, you can visit www.sdbermuda.bm for more information, email sdu@gov.bm or feel free to blog at www.sustain-bermuda.blogspot.com. Your support is welcomed.

Martha Dismont is, a member of the Sustainable Development Roundtable, where she chairs the subcommittee on Strengthening Families and also is the Executive Director of a local children's charity, The Family Centre. Martha can be contacted on 232-1116 or by email: martha@tfc.prevention.bm.