Alderney | January 20th, 2020
Dear Friends,
Well, I said I’d be back on 4th Jan and here I am – back a lot later than that! I don’t know about you, but everyone in my network (including me) has needed a little longer to get going this year. We have all needed more rest and a bigger pause.
Most of you will know that the Covid-19 pandemic is terrible in the UK with more deaths yesterday (19th Jan) than at any time since it began. This month, I had intended to leave the island where I am living to see my children, but travel restrictions make this difficult (and idiotic) and my family are urging me to stay in a place where they know I am safe.
It was hard to not to be with them at Christmas and then New Year and then my 60th birthday (WHAT?! I hear you cry!). Here is a photo of me holding lobsters. On my big day, I had a lovely lobster lunch with my mother, brother and a close friend among many other birthday events! I felt cherished and lucky, weird though it was to be so far from my children.
2021 started with a bang!
I am delighted to let you know that THREE grants have come good for us already this year. They are small pieces of work, but really important too, and two are funded by new donors to help us work with new partners. I’d rather share the details when the funds have cleared but I think it’s fine to share with you that we will be working on:
- HIV and AIDS plus hygiene and well-being with new partners in Swaziland;
- Heart health and resilience with new partners in Guam; and
- Well-being and nutrition with new partners in Zambia.
All three of these projects have outputs linked to new posters and/or storybooks that will then be available for free to our global community.
At the tail end of last year, it was great to reconnect with the Child-to-Child network. Many new ideas and are developing from fascinating conversations with new allies.
Numbers
In December we had a further 2,544 downloads of Children for Health content from our website. In total we have had 62,578 downloads our website from users in 177 countries. There have been 59,067 readers of our books on the Worldreader platform too!
Children for Health webinars
During this break – as well as a lot of rest, relaxation and swimming in the freezing cold sea – 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? This has inspired me to start preparing a webinar and Q&A that I will conduct 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.
Message me if you are interested in attending and I’ll make sure you are alerted of the times and dates!
Blog
We have not really got going with new blog posts this year although there are a lot of great topics lined up. If you are new to this community and would like to see a very organised list or everything we put on the blog last year – here is the link to our annual round-up and at the end of this newsletter is a list of links to blog posts.
Community and Donors
We warmly welcome the new people who have joined our community in the past few weeks – some of whom are also new donors to Children for Health. If you are thinking of donating, the process is really easy. Just click below!
If you live on Alderney and want to donate – I’m afraid my donations platform have told me you have to pretend you live in Guernsey (GRRR)! For those that don’t know, Alderney is a separate island to Guernsey but because we are within the Bailiwick of Guernsey – the address line has to be Guernsey to tie into the Guernsey postcode!
And finally…
My mother is 93 and here she is getting her Covid-19 vaccine. My brother (and very active chair of the Children for Health Trustees) can be seen lurking in the background!
Until next week!
Clare