Nutrition Poster Headline News!
We published our Nutrition Poster on August 1st! Download this and other Free Resources on our website now.
We have had a lot of help from experts all over the world, they helped us review the messages and images and gave us good ideas to put on the back of the poster too. It’s taken longer than we advertised in June’s newsletter, but it was well worth the wait!
It was an interesting and challenging process. We did not expect the extent of feedback we got on our original set of 10 messages as these were so carefully developed over a 4-month period three years ago, and we felt very attached to them. BUT we pride ourselves on being a listening and learning organisation and had a change of heart. So much so, that ALL the messages are slightly changed.
We now feel that the process of developing a poster is a great opportunity to review our original messages and revise them as necessary.
It’s really important to emphasise that these messages will not feel right for everyone. They are also a list to use with children and do not aim to be a community nutrition curriculum! Some of the suggestions we were given seemed too complex for children – or too long to qualify as ‘a message’. We hope you like the result.
Please help us get the word out and forward this newsletter or send a link to the poster to people you know who might like to see it.
If you (or your organisation!) would like to help us develop the remaining eight posters, please get in touch!
Nutrition Month
July was Nutrition month and to mark this Topic of the Month we have done our usual work to broadcast our nutrition work and resources as well as focussing on completing the poster.
Since we only have 10 topics to highlight, we don’t have a Topic of the Month in August or December. We will use the time to promote other work we’ve done and we’ll send out any updates on social media, so be sure to check us out on Facebook and Twitter.
Monitoring Downloads
Since June, our free resources have been published on:
- The Save the Children International Free Resources Library and
- On the Worldreader platform. News just in from Worldreader… “Right after your books were added to our eReader libraries, two projects we launched in Uganda chose 6 of your titles, and 2,050 copies of them were distributed to 300 devices. One project is in a school, and the other one in public libraries.”
Since we started monitoring downloads of our free resources (posters, story books and booklets) from our website in April, there have been 1,560 direct downloads by people in 63 countries! We’re delighted and excited to know that our resources are helping children across the globe.
A New storybook in Progress
We are sometimes asked what a school that embraces all the Children for Health ideas might be like! So we are working with our Children for Health author, Liz Gifford and a couple of field partners to develop a storybook that takes on this challenge. This will be our first non ‘health topic’ related story. Let us know if you would like to help us by reading the first draft or ideally, reading it with a group of children aged 10-12 and sending us back your views.
Partnerships in Progress
Our new partnership with Peek Vision is gathering momentum but instead of starting our work in Botswana, it looks like we will be heading for Zimbabwe instead. Zimbabwe is a country very close to my heart. My eldest child, Beatrice, is named after a small town an hour’s drive south of Harare! I spent a great deal of time in Zimbabwe some time ago but never with Children for Health so this will be a new beginning in a country that feels like an old friend. We are hoping to start our work there in September.
The focus is eye health and we will also be working with an adolescent behaviour specialist and trialling a new theory of change to help us understand how to design the very best interventions that will have the most impact and all this WITH young adolescents not just FOR them.
The PCAAN Nutrition programme in Mozambique is receiving lot of interest and attention in Mozambique and a strong team there is working with the UN organisation the FAO to scale it. There is talk of the programme being rolled out nationally. Exciting times!
Other Activities
Children for Health has been a little quiet recently and there has not been a lot on the blog. I have been away travelling in Japan with my 16-year-old son and it’s now the summer school holidays when the business of the charity is a little slower than usual.
We’ll swing back into action in September, but meanwhile, why not take some time and explore behind the scenes in How We Do It or browse through our Blog Archives.
Thank you and best wishes,
