GoodHeart | Aunt Lize Spelling Bee honours family heritage

His island roots mean the world to Kurtious Loney-Walsh. The New York-based medical professional, whose parents were raised in Jamaica before migrating to the United States, returns to The Rock every August for a philanthropic venture he established to reward students with sharp vocabularies. That work has become part of the Loney-Walsh Collection, his non-profit organisation dedicated to expanding literacy, educational opportunities and access to resources for under-served communities in Jamaica and the United States.

The Aunt Lize Spelling Bee, named in memory of Loney-Walsh’s late maternal great-grandmother, staged its sixth annual iteration in his family’s hometown of Albion Mountain, St Mary, last month. Thirty primary and secondary school students from the area received new laptops, tablets and cash incentives after demonstrating their word smarts in the competition.

For the unabashedly patriotic Loney-Walsh, pouring back into local youth has become one of his priorities. “I grew up between rural Jamaica and Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Neither environment was a place where opportunities were just handed to you,” he told GoodHeart in a post-spelling bee conversation at Albion Mountain Primary School.