Community Newsletter | 15 February 2021
Alderney | Feb 15th | 2021
Dear Friends
News from the sparkling isle…
I’VE HAD WRITERS BLOCK!
Guernsey went into lockdown over two weeks ago now, we have ONE case who is now recovering fine and life on the island feels a bit different.
The sea and the winds are extremely cold and today there were snow flurries on the beach!
Conference Clare
I attended a virtual Conference: “Unlocking the Potential in Child and Adolescent Health”. It’s GOOD to have a conference focussing on this isn’t it? Our work with Children for Health was of great relevance. There is new research coming out that identifies the very young adolescent (10-14) as a particularly good cohort to focus on in health education. Well, I’ve been saying this for 30 years!
LOVELY to ‘meet’ Susan Stasi at the conference – one of our friends in this community. We’ve had a meeting on Zoom. Her career is amazing. She is now running Rose Academies – ‘empowering with knowledge’. We are working out if there is potential for a joint venture.
We have very many new friends finding us through this conference and follow up on LinkedIn. WELCOME!
Children for Health webinars
As mentioned in our last newsletter, 
we have had many organisations and individuals contacting us and asking more or less the same questions: can they have more information about us, what we do and how they can work with us? So I’m running some webinars and Q&A session over Zoom each month.
The format will remain the same for each webinar to reduce the investment of time on my part. If there is a call for it I might then add further webinars which address specific questions or topics. It will grow organically I think.
Our first meeting is on 22nd February at 16:00 GMT. At the appointed time, join via Zoom, the meeting ID is 914 2578 1239 and the passcode is B4pGP7.
Message me if you are interested in attending, have questions about the above meeting or would like to be altered about the next webinar!
New projects
Writing stories with children in Guam
I have just finished the first of two training sessions with a teacher/facilitator in Guam who is going to work online with a class of Grade 5s and together we are all going to create a storybook about resilience. It’s been great fun putting the programme together. I love being in front of people so training anyone online all feels a bit weird. I’ll keep you posted on how it all goes. She will be using some of Children for Health tried and tested methods like: Draw and Write, the Children’s Ideas Chart (find this on page four of our Eye Health book) and Generating Story Snippets.
Our planning calls have been a really important part of the process as much of what we discuss defines the methods I’ve selected and the sequence of activities. It’s so hard to do this work ‘off the shelf’ – as each setting requires different approach. This picture is of Renee who has worked on her own version of our Rainbow Tree.
As I’ve been doing this training, I’ve been reflecting on the amazing time I had with a group of children in Mozambique – this time last year. How long ago that seems.
News about our resources
Shooting Stars
Our friends at Worldreader have been in touch to say how pleased they are with the title they commissioned, Shooting Stars! It’s had 4,676 readers since it launched on their platform already. Check the links below for Worldreader blog posts in which our books are mentioned:
Also, if you access the Worldreader app, you’ll see a banner about the Women in Sports collection, and all the books included in it.
For more on Shooting Stars here’s our launch blog post.
Everyone Counts
It’s great to have Everyone Counts as a read along video. A big thanks to a volunteer videographer, Ryan in South Africa for doing this for us during his lockdown. It been beautifully narrated by Ben Strauss and produced by his sister Min. Thank you to them all. They have created a very valuable resource. Click this link just to hear how fantastic it is and anyone whose child is wanting to learn English, this book will be a great way for them to listen and practice.
Translations
Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Arabic!
We have four amazing volunteers working with us at the moment and one of these is managing the highly complex job of volunteer translators. I think we have around 40 people at present working on translating selected resources into 12 new languages. The volunteers are translating the 100 Message Booklet and when possible our story, The Four Friends which is ABOUT Children for Health and our principles and values… and then Unlocked! which is our story about the Covid pandemic.
Because of this effort over several months we now have some of our key resources available in:
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Arabic
- Italian
Go and take a look at the new resources! We’ll be adding more over the next few weeks too.
A HUGE thank you to the dedicated volunteers who have made this happen!
That’s me done for now, more soon! Sorry there has been a bit of a gap, thank you for reading!
Clare
P.S. See me and my brother Tobias on a FREEZING beach (winds of -4). The big hug is from TODAY – he is in my support bubble and it was the first hug from anyone for almost three weeks.
