Lockdown Week 8-14 June, 2020
Dear Friends,
Welcome to new members of our community!
We are ‘inching out of lockdown’. Our family’s ‘inching’ event was an 18th birthday party for our son, Daniel – with six friends – socially distancing in the garden! Thanks goodness for fine, warm weather. Never a certainty during the English ‘summer’! It was so great to see him after all these weeks of lockdown, with his friends, chatting, laughing and having fun. Daniel is my youngest and so, I am no longer a mother of two ‘children’ but of two young adults!
COVID-19
Here again is the link to our curated list of Covid-19 resources for now. No additions since last week. Do let us know how you are doing!
Sustainability in School Health Programming
The week started brilliantly with a fascinating webinar on a PhD project focused on sustainability in school health programmes from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This has inspired me to create a checklist of important considerations at a programme design stage. Yet again the research concluded with a call for more ‘implementation science’. Also, I was also SHOCKED to learn of the amounts of money poured into small-scale school health programmes which seemed quite weak in their design. I have often thought that Children for Health could play a role as a programme design detective… finding gaps and weaknesses BEFORE school health programmes are implemented. Comments please!
Children for Health Online School
Creating a Children for Health online school (alongside partners) is something that we have discussed with three different prospective partners this week, in Guam, India and the UK! I’ve resisted the idea of our first version of this being ‘off the shelf’. Ideally, we’d develop bespoke online training to meet a partners’ specific needs. We would then repurpose the training and offer it more generally. The aims of such courses would include introducing educators and programme managers in the Children for Health approach and methods using case studies, content and activities. Is an online course something you would use? Comments please!
Girls in Sport
Great that this week we made progress with our new ‘Girls in Sport’ storybook title for Worldreader and connected with their partners in Ghana for a rich discussion about the reasons that adolescent girls drop out of sport. Their fascinating insights will inform the development of the story.
Getting Us Connected
We were very pleased this week to be introduced to an early career development professional who loves what we do and has offered to volunteer for us, managing a project to increase our global reach and network.
Talk to Clare!
I’m offering 10 free 30-minute consultations to a total of ten people who wish to explore any aspect of the work of Children for Health in a ‘no strings attached’ conversation. As members of my community, you are at the front of the queue. E-mail me to schedule an appointment clare@childrenforhealth.org. (Please note that we do not have staff vacancies, we are not a donor and cannot provide funding!)
This week, on the blog…
- We had been nominated as the Charity of the Year at this year’s, Homerton May Ball (a big student party in one of the colleges of the University of Cambridge). This was to take place on Friday June 12th but this year the ball was cancelled. I trained as a teacher at Homerton from 1979-83 and my work and career were featured in their Annual Review! It’s only when I looked back that I realised what an outstanding education I received at Homerton. More about this here.
- An integrated approach to addressing the issue of childhood depression.
- A feature on the five key messages linked to the publication, Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition: Volume 8. Child and Adolescent Health and Development.
- A featured lesson plan from our new Eye Health book.
- Our LifeSkills activity of the week is on responsibility and consequences.
Our Growing Support base – Join us if you can!
After our mini campaign last week, several people responded, and our support base grew a little more. We are getting closer to our 100 target so… if you think our work is valuable and you are able, please consider donating at any level and enable us to make it through this difficult year. Click here to go to our donations platform (UK taxpayers can also add gift aid).
If you are not in a position to give, but have ideas to help or contacts with partners who might like to know more about our work or work with us, please get in touch.
Have a great week!
Clare