Newsletter December 2019

Dear Friends of Children for Health,

A HUGE welcome to members of my ‘Life Skills’ community. Many in the Children for Health community will know that before I set up CfH I set up a website called ‘Life Skills Handbooks’, where I posted ideas, lesson plans, news and resources to help those wanting to work with children to develop and strengthen their life skills. This endeavour has always been closely linked to the work of Children for Health but until now I have kept the two separate. All of the LifeSkills content is now on Children for Health and a week or so ago, I invited the Life Skills community to come over and join us and many have accepted this invitation. WELCOME!

In this newsletter we have SO MUCH to boast about at Children for Health. Loyal members, please help me! Share the word about Children for Health and all our free resources with your networks.

Here are some of our highlights since I was last in touch:

• Our Digital Hub – IT’S HAPPENING!
  In September we had 919 downloads from our digital hub. This rose to 1,770 downloads in October and in November we had 3,149 downloads! We think it really starting to happen. These downloads have taken place in 146 countries. Many of the materials are downloaded in the UK, the USA and in Europe and then passed on to international projects. It’s really exciting to see these numbers growing month by month.
• We have completed an Eye Health and Vision Poster and a teacher’s book. There have been 674 downloads of this poster since it was published in October. The book is in the last stages of review, we’ll let you know as soon as it is available. Thank you to Peek Vision for their support.

  

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  We published our new storybook, The Four Friends – Build a School. This book is a departure from our usual topic-focussed stories, instead it’s about our broader ethos. In the book, children help to ensure their new school puts their own knowledge, experience, skills and ideas at the heart of how it’s run. Thank you to the many donors who send us ‘unrestricted’ funding. This is one of the projects we have been able to do with this funding.

• We published our English version booklet, 100 Health Messages For Children To Learn and Share into SEVENTEEN more languages! 14 of these languages spoken in India. These booklets are available in formats for mobile and tablets too. Thank you to an individual donor who sponsored the 2018/9 translation project.

  

• Volunteers are translating our 100 messages booklet into the African languages, Ewe and Twi and in the national language of Cambodia, Khmer. If you want to volunteer to translate our content, we’d love to hear from you!
• We have developed two new posters focussing on the problem that is DIARRHOEA. Here is the diarrhoea poster for our series. Thank you to Save the Children and to the James Tudor Foundation for their support. Note all our wonderful illustrations which are by David Gifford. I’ve been working with David for over 30 years.

  

• Our Action on Diarrhoea poster is in its final review with the DRC Save the Children team. This poster will be available in three languages: English French and Tshiluba. Here is what our first draft looked like! Every element of the poster goes through a review by practitioners in the field. The final result looks very different. We like our posters to be connected to a context but useful worldwide.

  

• We have secured funding for a small project in Mozambique where we work directly with adolescents to understand, plan, implement and measure how to address health issues that affect their lives. This will happen in February 2020. They will be lots to share. I cannot wait to get back there and I’ll meet up with some of the teachers who have been continuing the nutrition education work we helped to start in 2014, without any funding. Here is Mikas, one of our stars, who is standing in the shape of a ‘T’. The T-shaped teacher is one of our training tools!

  

• We are forging an academic partnership with the University of Loughborough which hopes to see our participatory methods being tested and our materials translated into Spanish and some of them adapted for use by children and their parents in Mexico.
• We have a new list of health messages and activities focussing on Oral Health.

And YES…

We are fundraising, fundraising, fundraising. It is HARD to get our voice heard alongside the bigger charities with their big fundraising departments. There is ONE action you can take.

Our work began with the idea of curating, creating and distributing ONE HUNDRED health messages for children to learn and share.

We are campaigning to achieve ONE HUNDRED supporters who make a regular donation. Every time a donation comes in, we are notified. It feels like a hug and a cheer. If YOU love what we do, please consider setting up a monthly donation. It is a huge deal.