I love April. In the UK, it signals the end of winter and the start of spring flowers and new seeds growing; but this month we seem to have had either hot-and-sunny high summer or damp-and-windy winter gloom. Interesting weather? Definitely, and an interesting month at Children for Health HQ too – and new seeds growing!

First things first – GDPR!

You may have heard about the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that comes into effect 25^th May, 2018. To comply with GDPR consent requirements, we need to confirm that you would like to remain part of the Children for Health community and receive messages and free content from us. Being on our mailing list means that we keep a record of your email address, your name, your country and the organisation you work for. This helps us identify you and enables us to contact you. If you want to keep receiving messages from Children for Health, you MUST follow the instructions we’ll be sending in the next couple of to update your subscription settings and consent to continue hearing from us.

Exciting New Partnerships:

1. Peek Vision
   The next 12 months will see us working with them in Botswana and using our new ‘rainbow circle’ model of behaviour change and development, to really understand the barriers linked to young adolescents not wearing eye glasses once they are prescribed. Our plan is to work with groups of teachers and children to do a deep investigation and then from our new understanding we will co-create strategies to try out. We have developed a new tool, ‘The Rainbow Circle’, to help us with these investigations. We have loved our preliminary discussions with Peek Vision and think our mutual energy and curiosity signals great work together in the future. Peek Vision have said they want us on board for five years or so and we would love this too!

2. The World Health Organisation
   Late last month, I went to Geneva to meet with the Health Promotion Unit there to talk about how we can help develop educational materials for teachers that stand a chance of making an impact on the prevention of Non-Communicable Diseases. This month they have confirmed that they would like to work with us, initially on a storybook and a teachers resource linked to physical activity and then together we will find funding for another five storybooks. It’s fun to be working with the WHO – albeit a little David and Goliath in feel! The lack of physical activity is one of the top risk factors leading to increased non-communicable diseases.

3. The Internet In A Box
   You may remember a ‘hush hush’ project I mentioned in last month’s newsletter. This was the Internet In A Box (IIAB) project, which launched on 10^th April. We were asked to donate our content and a distilled version of our activities to the IIAB. This gadget is being marketed at a very low cost ($30US) all over India! The only hitch was that we needed to produce our content as HTML pages and in the 18 major languages of India! So, we set up a partnership with Translators without Borders and for the past couple of months we have been working together on this complex translation and type setting project. When we have finished, we will have the 100 messages for children to learn and share in 18 languages on our website for anyone in the region to take and use! Read more here: 100 Messages for Children to Learn & Share and the Internet In A Box.

Partnerships in Progress:

We love the work of this organisation, Think Equal, and I had the delightful experience of meeting their charismatic and passionate CEO, Leslee Udwin to talk about her work on social and emotional learning curriculum for young children in low-resource settings. The aim of the project is to promote equality. We are looking for ways to combine the Children for Health content and the Think Equal content to offer education, especially in settings where people are living as refugees. We’d also like to do a small pilot and film the process.

Please contact us with any ideas or contacts that can help us progress this!

Our New Poster on Preventing Malaria

This month, our focus has been on the prevention of Malaria. World Malaria Day was on the 25^th! As part of the work on malaria this month, we digitally ‘gathered’ a team of medical experts, teachers and other health education practitioners from three continents and together designed and revised (and revised and revised and revised!) a poster showing our 10 messages and ‘what children can do’. Our busy artist, David Gifford, is just putting the final touches on the result and soon it will be available for anyone to download and use in their programmes and projects. The insights we got from this process has been turned into an FAQ piece that appears on the reverse of the poster.

The basic design work for this poster will be used for the rest of the nine posters we seek to create and develop throughout this year (one poster for each of our 10 topics). We are thinking about using a crowd funding platform to create the rest of the series (but we are a bit scared). Discover more about the process and to take a look at draft two out of five.

Fund a Poster!

If you, your company or organisation would like to fund a poster for one of our 10 topics, the co-creation process with experts from around the world costs around £2,000 GBP and your name or company logo will appear on the poster. For more information, see our Fundraising page.

ALL our content now (even more) FREE

Is that a weird title? The content is either free or not free – right? Well, our content has always been free, but we made folks jump through a few hoops so we could get their e-mail addresses. We wanted to follow-up with them later to see how they used it, but a few months down the line, it is clear that too many people are put off by this hoop-jumping. So, our materials (including books, charts, posters and guides) are now “even more free”. Just hop on to this link and download away!

We have a way of knowing how many times the materials are downloaded and from which countries, so we will still be gathering valuable metrics. If you’d like to give us your e-mail address so we can keep up with you, please join our community.

This Month on the Blog

In addition to the links we have set out above:

• Our post on the launch of a report by the GSMA – creating mobile health solutions for behaviour change
• Our post on a successful strategy to motivate adolescents to take up healthier eating
• Our post on our April topic about preventing malaria with a summary of things that children can do
• For those who missed it last month… our first post about a new direction for Children for Health – Adolescent Well-Being and Resilience

Thank you and best wishes

Clare Hanbury
Founder and CEO, Children for Health