Newsletter Issue 4 April 2010

Newsletter from the desk of Clare Hanbury

Issue 4
April 2010

Here is an update from the desk of Clare Hanbury to summarise key events  between November 2009 and April 2010. I am sending it to all those who have signed up on my blog or websites: www.lifeskillshandbooks.com www.youngsolutionsinternational.com and www.clarehanbury.com

Hello readers!

When I lived in Hong Kong in the mid-80’s I worked VERY hard as a class teacher at the wonderful Chinese International School. I also worked hard in my job as a volunteer language teacher at Chi Ma Wan refugee camp where several thousand Vietnamese people were living in what was called a ‘closed camp’ (i.e. they could  not get out!) I traveled to Chi Ma Wan by boat and spent every Wednesday evening and Saturday morning with my students there.  As those of you who have lived in, worked in or even just visited Hong Kong, it was and I am sure still is one hell of a good playground for someone in their mid-20’s! The consequence of two demanding jobs and some heavy duty playtime was that, from time to time, I would go to sleep on a Friday and wake somewhere around tea time on Sunday. I became known for hibernating in this hedgehog-like way to give myself a recharge!

As far as this blog and my other sites are concerned I have once again been as good as buried in a heap of straw in the dark since November. Now it is spring and I am emerging again. Don’t ask for a better explanation. I cant think of one but THANK-YOU to loyal readers who have been nudging me out of my slumber. I am stunned to see that I have had 7,000+ visitors to the Clare Hanbury site apparently enjoying what is already there. Miraculously there seems to be on going interest in my whereabouts on this and my other sites.

I have been enjoying working very lightly with people interested in using the YSi methods to strengthen their projects. I have a firm belief in the use of mentoring to support people as they take their projects forward in a way that is best for them and their youngsters. Mentoring and coaching methods seem to work very powerfully and I am wondering if they are more effective in the long term, than training workshops.

Summary

In this e-newsletter I describe:

1.    Work completed Nov 2009-March 2010

• My three websites migrating to a weblog platform
• Developing a booklet on Pre-Service Teacher Education and HIV and AIDS with UNESCO
• An Evaluation of the Violence is Preventable Project with Eighteen Under and the UBS Optimus Foundation
• The Street Child World Cup, Durban, March 2010 with the Amos Trust

2.    Work in progress

• The Top Ten MHealth Project
• Developing a module on Children’s Participation and Child Protection for the Keeping Children Safe Toolkit with the Child-to-Child Trust and the Keeping Children Safe Coalition
• Monitoring and Evaluation Guidelines on LIfeskills for Youth Development with the Jacobs Foundation

3.    Sources of inspiration

• The Be the Best You Can Be Project with 21st Century Legacy
• The book launch of Building Hope and Kate Harrison 
• The TED website and Elizabeth Pisani
• Hieu Hoang
• Vincent
• Tobias

4.    Ideas forming and my questions to you…

I will blog separately and more fully on aspects of much of this work which has occupied and inspired me since November 2009. Please send comments, opinions and ideas on any of this either on the blog or directly to me on clare.hanbury@zen.co.uk. 

Read on if you want details about what I've been up to!

Work completed

Websites migrated to a weblog platform 

In November, I completed the migration of my websites to blogsites. While websites have their uses I realised that my two main purposes were to use the sites to communicate with an ever-increasing community of people interested in my work and to make resources and ideas as freely available as I could. I also wanted to manage the sites myself!  The Clare Hanbury.com site is what I regard as my ‘base camp’, the Young Solutions international site is the site where I locate my core work. The projects and services that meet the needs of those wanting to learn about tools that work to inspire and engage young people to participate and work with them on health and social justice projects. The Lifeskills Handbooks site is one that serves the needs of those specifically looking to develop or strengthen life skills programmes with or for young people. I have a sign up facility on all the sites and an offer on the YSi and Lifeskills site so have a look at these if you haven’t before.

I have revised the YSi handbook so its now in its second edition and the Lifeskills Handbook is now available more cheaply than before. Both can be purchased from their respective sites using paypal. Dont forget that if you cannot pay or cannot pay in this way - then get in touch and we will work something out. What is more important to me than anything is that my materials are being USED.

Developing Booklet 6 on Good Policy and Practice in HIV and AIDS Education: Pre-Service Teacher Education with UNESCO

I have just completed my part in putting together this booklet. The purpose of the series is to present ideas, key findings and programmatic examples on different HIV and AIDS themes and to pull together experiences from different regions. In many countries it is immensely challenging just to provide schools with teachers let alone teachers who have had good enough training to make them effective and efficient teachers in HIV prevention. This made it all the more inspiring to learn how people in resource-poor environments are finding ways to do just this through the production and use of good materials for teachers to use with students and through innovative teacher education programmes. The two most remarkable programmes I came across are both in Southern Africa. One group are producing a high quality teacher educators manual to use with students and which trains the teacher educators too. Another a group are using a combination of face to face workshops, materials, on-line learning and buddy and mentoring system to develop and support teacher educators in the Southern African countries where there is a very high HIV prevalence rate. There is also some great work going on in Papua New Guinea. I will keep you posted on the availability of what will be a free booklet. I will publish a couple of  posts on the two examples mentioned above and here is a link to the rest in the series.

An Evaluation of the Violence is Preventable Project with Eighteen Under and the UBS Optimus Foundation

It was a pleasure to visit and learn about the work of the Dundee-based Violence is Preventable project (VIP). The project’s broad aim is to prevent primary and secondary abuse and violence (in all its forms) towards children, young people and vulnerable adults. VIP reaches thousands of children and families across Scotland and beyond and are leaders in the field of violence prevention. They produce wonderful resources for use with children from 2-18, for young people and even for the elderly. They work directly with schools, through other voluntary sector organisations and through other related professional bodies like the police, the fire service and social work. Many of their resources are being translated. They have developed a specific training system so that all those working with the children on the VIP programme do so with a ‘prevention mindset’ that will help to support children to talk about and listen to each others experiences of violence. The project is the brainchild of staff of the organisation, Eighteen and Under. This organisation supports survivors of violence. After many years of this work they felt it important to establish a project that had the power to address the root causes of violence and to break the cycle of hurt people who hurt people.

I will be publishing several posts about this work over the coming weeks and the many insights already helped me design the Street Child Rights conference in Durban and will be food for my next project with the Child-to-Child Trust and the Keeping Children Safe Coalition.

The Street Child World Championship, Durban, March 2010 and the Amos Trust

This has got to be one of the most amazing work experiences of my career which so quickly and so deeply re-energised my core aim, to involve children and young people in health and social justice projects and issues in a way that is life changing for themselves and those around them.

The task was to design and facilitate a children’s rights conference alongside the finals of a football championship contested by teams of street children from eight different counties, all in a football stadium in Durban, South Africa and just ahead of the actual world cup football finals.

I started out being a very occasional adviser to the conference organisers –to help them plan a conference where the children’s voices would really be stimulated and heard and in a way that their ideas and opinions could be documented and used to advocate for the rights of street children all over the world. I was then asked to come and do it! WOW!

The conference took place over three mornings and the youngsters were split into groups by nationality and led through structured discussions based on three themes. One on each day. They were;
1)    Home
2)    Violence
3)    Access to health and education.
Their thoughts and ideas were noted down by volunteers at the conference and translated if necessary.

I was there for 6 days – among the hardest working days of my life. One day began at 6am and ended at 1.30am! As many of you will know Durban is a city by the sea but I did not even get glimpse of the sea between Thursday at 1.30pm and Tuesday at 10.30am!

I hope that this is enough to get you to visit the Street Child World Cup website where you can read more and view videos of the children, their ideas, their art work and their football. I can be seen in action in this this video about events that took place on the Sunday.
As before I’ll be blogging more about aspects of this experience over the coming weeks.

Work in progress

The Top Ten MHealth project

Regular readers may know that I am trying to get a mobile phone child health project off the ground. I’m calling it The Top Ten. Its about getting key health messages out there and on mobile phones that will inform and inspire children (through the adults that live and work with them) of primary school age in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was called The 100 but I have tweaked, squeezed, squashed and distilled the idea and I am pretty happy with the way the project looks right now. I’ve got the content. I’ve got some great allies to help with the visuals, the techie stuff and with the communications campaign side of things. I have a parent organisation (a registered charity) and maybe two. I have the encouragement of experts at The UN Foundation who know their stuff on mobile health and the report this links to is worth a read. The Top Ten is a project I want to establish to honour the memory of my friend Prof David Morely who died last July, a consummate networker and a child health guru. Read more about his amazing life on earlier blog posts. I’ve tried to move The Top Ten along in my spare time and I just don’t have enough of this. If there’s an angel out there. I need £15K. Once its up and running it will run itself. Something or someone will come along to make this happen – I just know it.

Developing a module on Children’s Participation and Child Protection for the Keeping Children Safe Toolkit with the Child-to-Child Trust and the Keeping Children Safe Coalition

I am just getting going with this project. The purpose of the project is to develop a module of child protection training materials that focus on actively working with children to help to protect themselves. This module will become part of a toolkit available online in English and French.

The project will draw from many years experience working on teacher training materials development with The Child-to-Child Trust, on children’s participation and (latterly) on child protection issues. I’ll be developing 6 core exercises with development activities and extra materials to develop the facilitation skills of educators working with the children so they coach rather than teach the children in these sessions). The projects will take me to Sierra Leone in June to work with teachers and teacher educators from different regions in Africa. I am looking forward to it and will keep you posted.

Monitoring and Evaluation Guidelines on Life Skills for Youth Development with the Jacobs Foundation

I start this project in May and it will pull together several strands that interest me. As many readers know I have written extensively on Life Skills and developed many school-based and teachers materials for setting up or strengthening Life Skills Projects. This includes the Life Skills Handbook available from another of my sites.

I have also written a booklet on Monitoring and Evaluating Children’s Participation in Health and Development for The Child-to-Child Trust and worked with partners from four countries to develop indicators that could guide planning and evaluation activities. Last year I was involved in a project to evaluate a Life Skills programme in Sierra Leone. I am really interested to examine the tools that Jacobs Foundation partners use to monitor and evaluate their projects. Much like many of my other publications this one will be a piecing together of what is best from others work to make something new that will take all those of us involved in this type of work - forward. I’ll be keeping you posted.

Sources of inspiration

Project Transformation and 21st Century Legacy

I am so pleased to be a part of a movement of people in the UK who are bringing together the very best of thinking in personal development and in education to support the implementation of new educational methods themes and projects – government and otherwise. .

I was one of the 40 or so attendees at the first Project Transformation conference in February and during that day heard about the 21st Century Legacy Project headed up by an extraordinary trainer, Les Duggan and the Olympic Champion, David Hemery (Hurdling ’68). Together with Mark Solomons, this team have developed a two-term Life Skills programe for Secondary Schools that begins with an inspirational talk by a high achiever – such as an Olympic athlete. The talk is then followed by 11 further sessions that help young people discover the skills they need to turn their dreams into reality.

 
Since the conference, I met Les and David a couple of times and participated on their training of trainers programme. These have been very rich encounters from which I am learning how to further develop my own training style and approach and how to embed coaching tools in schools in the UK. There is such a close alignment between my own aims and those of 21st Legacy and I’m looking forward – with some impatience - to finding out where our current friendship leads. Do look at the website and the amazing video that demonstrates the power of that this lifeskills programme is already having on the lives of young people.

The book launch for Building Hope by Kate Harrison 

I was really pleased to be at the launch of Kate’s book, Building Hope. This is a  practical manual about how HIV and AIDS affects the lives of children and their families and what can be done to help. It is written for community leaders and families and for people who find themselves looking after affected children. The book covers topics such as how to mobilise your community, the importance of health and nutrition, psychological and emotional support and education. It outlines how to challenge the stigma and discrimination that children and extended families may face because of HIV.

Kate Harrison a great friend of mine and worked at the Aids Alliance for seven years. She joined Comic Relief as HIV coordinator in 2008 and is now portfolio manager of international grants. You can get more information and copies of the book from TALC (Teaching AIDS at Low Cost).

The TED website and Elizabeth Pisani

I love the TED website. I have to ration myself to get any work done. It was a real treat when on 6th April back I was notified that a friend from way back, Elizabeth Pisani had a video up. Here’s what its about. WATCH!

Armed with bracing logic, wit and her "public-health nerd" glasses, Elizabeth Pisani reveals the myriad of inconsistencies in today's political systems that prevent our dollars from effectively fighting the spread of HIV. Her research with at-risk populations -- from junkies in prison to sex workers on the street in Cambodia -- demonstrates the sometimes counter-intuitive measures that could stall the spread of this devastating disease.

Hieu Hoang

Hieu was my ‘top’ student living in Chi Ma Wan refugee camp 1985-7 and we became friends there. I remeber hhis incredible capacity to learn. His determination to use his time to learn, to share his learning with others and to pass the time creatively when living in pretty awful conditions was an inspiration.  We lost touch after both he and I left Hong Kong but this wonderous internet brought us together again last year. He has been thorough great adversity and difficulty as he tried to settle in Canada and then New York State but now is settled and has a family in Houston, Texas. Here is a picture ofd us in our younger days - in 1986!

Vincent

You can catch sight of Vincent on several of the Street Child World Cup videos. I want to write about the chat I had with him on the bus on the last day of the event. I asked him what the event had done for him. He told me that before the event he was a street child and now he is a former street child. That he was going to make his way back to Jo’burg and find his mum. That he would use the skills he’d learned and the courage and self-confidence that he’d got from the football championship to use to patch things up with his mum. That he’d return to his school and study hard. He wants to be an electrician. I am sure he will do all these things and more.

These young people in their smart football kit were like all our children. Our hearts would break when we heard their stories. Once you touch the humanity of these children, there is no going back, no day when you can rest easy having done nothing.

Tobias

Tobias is my brother, an inspiration. A host to my family for four whole weeks over the Christmas holidays and more. While our UK-based friends and family froze, we sweltered in the summer heat of Rio de Janiero. No day passed by without happy times, laughter, hugs, good food, good cheer. Thanks for your generosity, consistency and love.

Commands, ideas forming and my questions to you…

• Find me an angel!
• Do not rest today until you have done something, anything to make this world a tiny bit better for children like Vincent.
• Buy Kate’s book – if you do not need it, make a donaton to TALC so they can send it to someone who does.
• Should we be making those who may be violent, feel important?
• How can personal development guru’s help to inspire and support educators in their most difficult of tasks?
• Is mentoring better than training to support people develop new projects?
• Are there simple training activities that can give teachers the tools and mindset to coach their students (or coach them more than they do?). If so what are they?

Thats all (ALL?) for now!

Clare, April 27th 2010