My purpose is to use my skills as a teacher, trainer, consultant, writer and coach to work with people and projects working to promote children's participation in health and education from policy to a field level.
I do this in 5 ways:
1. Consultancy and advisory work
I provide a wide range of consultancy services. These include advisory work to assess programme or proposal design, feasibility studies, monitoring and evaluation, training and facilitation, policy level work and developing materials for projects and programmes with field partners, .
2. Writing curricula, toolkits, guidelines and other materials
I develop materials for other projects
This has included developing toolkits, curricula, lesson plans, training packs and stories for a number of projects and organisations. The focus of most of these is to affect health and behavioural outcomes. The materials support educators of all kinds to recognise the abilities of children and young people to participate in making positive changes to their own and others health and development. You can find a list of my publications by clicking here. Where possible the list includes links to where you can download the materials.
I develop my own materials:
- The Young Solutions international handbook. This is a handbook which provides an overview of children's participation and frameworks for participatory approaches to teaching and training. It sets out a unique approach to promoting children's participation in health and development. The 3rd edition is in the process of being developed. It should be ready by February 2012. Please sign up to the community for further information, the launch date and for special offers.
- The Life Skills Handbook This handbook contains 61 Life Skills activity sessions. Sample sessions can be downloaded for free from the Life Skills Handbooks website. www.lifeskillshandbooks.com
3. Teaching on and running training courses
I have conducted numerous training workshops and courses over the years for many different projects and in many different countries. Many of them focus on strengthening the participation of children in these projects. The main purpose is often to help people understand the deeper skills needed to make children's participation work, practice these and help them to overcome any challenges they may face in their workplace to implement the ideas. With the help of children who almost always attend my workshops for some of the time, most participants tell me they find these events inspiring and transformative and have lasting impact. There are many very good models and frameworks to help navigate this surprisingly complex task.
I am linked to academic institutions in the UK such as the Institute of Public Health, University of Cambridge based at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge where I provide seminars for medical students.
In addition to these types of training I have developed three specialised training courses. Click here for more details on these courses.
.4. Mentoring
I have mentored tnumerous colleagues conducting projects wish seek to develop or strengthen their work with children and young people. For example, in July, The Keeping Children Safe Coalition asked me to support a colleague in Austria, preparing to conduct two TOT workshops in Africa on Children's Participation in Child Protection. I was struck once again by the power and efficiency of the mentoring relationship.
For several years I have made a study of mentoring in international development. I have worked with Patrick Lavin, a highly experienced mentor trainer on a mentoring system that could be offered to INGO's interested in establishing or developing a mentoring system. We will publish a summary of our work in the near future.
5. Speaking
I have undertaken several speaking assignments. Most of my experience in speaking has been to students, academics and to international development audiences.
My work is a mix of working to support others projects and working on my own projects. Please let me know if I can help you. If I do not have the right skill set, or not enough time, I may know others who do!
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