Newsletter 3

The Newsletter
from the desk of Clare Hanbury

Issue 3
JULY 2009

Hello readers!
Here is an update from the desk of Clare Hanbury to summarise the key events of May and June 2009. 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

A general note that in the last 6 weeks there have been high highs and low lows. High highs included a speaking gig in Denmark and low lows included a wretched flu bug that took 6 weeks to clear and that my 6 year old son was hit by a cyclist and broke both bones in his right lower leg. He’s in a full cast now and it’s a long slow recovery process but he’ll be OK. So there have been moments since my last newsletter when work and blogging in particular has taken a back seat. But back in the saddle now and hoping for a summer full of networking and news from you all!

Summary
In this e-newsletter I describe:

1.    Work completed

• Children’s Participation in Health: teaching medical students on the International Public Health course at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, UK
• The Role of Children and Young People in Development, a presentation at DANIDA in Copenhagen, Denmark
• Coaching
• Child Labour: a 30-minute assembly at my children’s school

2.    Work in progress

• Young Action for Health
• Young Solutions International Handbook second edition
• The Tricycle System

3. Special thanks to 

Evelyn Brealey, Adam Fletcher, Jo Manchester and to the ten people who have been coaching clients...

Work completed

• Children’s Participation in Health: teaching medical students on the International Public Health course at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge

It was great to be teaching again. I used to do a lot of this type of work when I was with The Child-to-Child Trust at the University of London’s Institute of Education. Evelyn Brealey is the project manager of Addenbrookes Abroad.  She and I designed a session that focused on children’s participation in health education and health promotion programmes. The students were led through some theory and international policies and guidelines. They were then shown videos and posters about children in different countries helping to prevent malaria, smoking related diseases, dehydration, scabies…among many other things. We conducted an activity where they had to construct their own projects and identify how and where children could help achieve the objectives. We finished with a discussion on what they students learned and how they might take this work forward. If you would like to see the materials we used or to book a similar teaching session, please get in touch.

• The Role of Children and Young People in Development a presentation to 40 NGO’s at a meeting hosted by DANIDA in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

For regular readers of my newsletters this was the SECOND visit to DANIDA I have made recently. This was a presentation to a much larger audience of 40 NGO’s and donors from the Nordic countries. So a high pressure gig! I was given a great welcome and thoroughly enjoyed my trip. I am collecting feedback on the presentation which people have so far described as lively, fun and useful. Click here for an audio version of the talk. In the presentation I focus on what we need to do to involve and engage children and young people in our projects at the programmatic level. It describes a simple framework that NGO’s can use to decide how they are doing with this work. Find out how I use this image of a bench to talk about children's rights!

The visit was also an opportunity to meet staff at DANIDA’s evaluation department again to further our discussions of the scope and timing of a systematic review of the evaluation on children and youth participation. Any studies you know or perspectives or input you can give on this would be really useful.

• Coaching

I love coaching. It is a magical process where you feel the support of someone beside you in a way that puts YOU at the center of your own solutions and gives you the courage to implement the solutions. For the best part of the last five years I have employed a coach to help me with my business, my professional development, my finances and my family life. It has always been a positive experience and always worth the money.

Since getting coach training, I have developed more sophisticated coaching tools which I use in my work. When coaching, I work in a highly focused way with clear objectives and outcomes set at the beginning and with a clear time boundary. So I would not be a coach for everyone and especially those who like a more open ended approach!

As some will know I have developed a coaching /mentoring system for local and international NGO’s with Patrick Lavin one of the lead mentor trainers in the UK. I believe that coaching skills are an essential part of the toolkit for anyone working in international development who is not from the country or countries which they serve. Coaching skills protect you from arrogance and from the temptation of giving advice to people whose lives, realities and culture you do not know and have not lived.

Recently I have been reading some great books on coaching and listening including this one by Nancy Kline, Time to Think. As mentioned in the last newsletter, I offered an hour’s free coaching to the first 12 people who contacted me. I broadcast this to all my blog readers and to my client lists. I loved the flurry and my list of 12 was full in 6 hours! Since then I have been conducting the sessions with two left to go!  The issues people have brought to the sessions have included:

• Checking strategy and tools in a complex coaching relationship
• Setting up a new Non Government Organisation (NGO)
• Setting up participatory research with young people in a developing country
• Time management and planning
• How to mange Trustees in a small NGO
• Trying to achieve a work-life balance as a member of staff in an International NGO
• Setting up a small health project with children
• Finding personal emotional distance (without loosing compassion) when working with dying children
• Setting up a lifeskills project, and
• Transitioning from a career in international development to working in the UK

What has made this work so rewarding is seeing the HUGE progress people make around their issue in one hour with only the support of a few simple questions.

Here is some feedback from three of the participants.

I had a laser coaching session with Clare. Clare has a wonderful, gentle though very precise manner of coaching and she supported me through my own process of understanding who I am as a coach and who I want to be as a coach. This ability to be totally non-judgemental and to help me dance around and inside clear facts - where facts could be emotions, or actions I might be inclined taking -  are unique to Clare. I could clearly see within myself what are my own skills, talents and potential. This wasn't a session about taking actions;  this was a very powerful session during which I was supported in tapping into my own powerful insights. From these insights, I created clarity and brought my own strengths to the surface.

Catherine Varga. Coaching Parents, Coaching Teenagers at IntelligentTeen, Sydney, Australia

I personally found it very useful to have a conversation with someone peripheral to our organization.  I thought that Clare was able to get a handle on the project/what I was saying very quickly. She asked appropriate questions to make me think and offered practical suggestions.  Clare made me feel comfortable early on in the conversation and I liked the informal feel of the conversation.  It’s obvious that Clare is passionate about what she does which is great and makes what she says resonate that much more.  Overall a positive experience and got me thinking about some interesting options around the research (i.e. The peer model that we talked about).  Thanks again and I will let you know how everything unfolds!

Kirsty

Thank you for your coaching today which I found very valuable. I think what surprised me most was the simplicity of your approach that completely masked its power. The few questions that you asked me as I talked through the issues were so well placed, so revealing and sometimes challenging, that some of them were like a slap in the face; making me realise that I had all of the answers within me already. You helped me move around the final pieces of the jigsaw so that I could complete the puzzle and understand the relationship between the issues I was working with. In this case that gave me both clarity and a confidence boost. Following this you provided further guidance on the power of goal setting accompanied by a gentle push to get me to start taking the action necessary for me to move forward.
                    Steve

I will be posting more about coaching, my coaching style and my results on the blog over the next few weeks. If you want to discuss coaching with me, please get in touch.

• Child Labour. A 30-minute assembly at my children’s school

Some of you will be scratching your heads and wondering why I’m including such a small item. Its because it relates directly to the work I did with Comic Relief earlier in the year and because the assembly really worked! I used the metaphor that we use n the Comic Relief booklet about the changes needed to transform the lives of street or working children.

Imagine the children are on one side of a raging river and to get from the side of difficulty to the side of opportunity they need to use four large, strong stepping stones of change:
-    Changes in laws and policies
-    Changes in society
-    Changes in the family and
-    Changes for themselves.

Very often projects focus on what they can do to change things for the children themselves. If this is done to the exclusion of other changes with the result that the children do not cross the river.

The session was a mix of story-telling, film, reading and physical activity. The activity involved all the children jumping into each of 4 hoops laid out on the floor. These hoops represented each of the ‘change’ stepping stones. They shouted out what each of the changes were as they did so. In this way they got themselves from one side of their school hall to the other! It worked! Here’s what the teacher said…

The assembly went brilliantly well. I did a follow on session with the juniors and they remembered loads about it.  We have talked about children being deprived of an education before and they didn't seem to understand the true implications but this time I think they did.  I am now planning to have a discussion on what they think the rights of children should be. Thanks!

Alison

Soon, I will post an audio link to explain how you can reproduce this session on Child Labour with any groups children that you know.

2.    Work in progress

• Young Action for Health

From September 2009 I will be setting up a new web-based campaign, Young Action for Health. The campaign is designed to broadcast the actions children are taking all over the world that improve their own and others heath and well-being. If you would like to join me as I develop this campaign, if you know people who might like to support it or if you know others I can link with, please let me know. I have a great team of people already building around me, these include the technical people, writers, illustrators and health experts. There are children out there who are leading the way witht his work and I want to be sure that their efforts get noticed and inspire others to grow and develop similar work. Preparing the content and links for this campaign is occupying most of my time at the moment!

• Young Solutions International Handbook Second Edition

I am about to complete the second edition of the Young Solutions International Handbook and will be making some of it available for free in August so watch to the blog if you’d be interested in this or join my list on www.youngsolutionsinternational.com

• The Tricycle System

The centrepiece of the Young Solutions international approach has 8 steps. The appraoch is a structure to support people wanting to develop a more participatory approach to workign with children or young peopel on health or development projects. The feedback I am getting is that 8 steps are too many steps! The approach is there to clarify not to confuse so I am transforming the 8-steps into 3 wheels and calling it The Tricycle System. I have been delighted with people's responses to the new system. Its amazing what the effect of a tweak can be! A booklet on The Tricycle System will be available for FREE very soon. I cant wait to hear what you all think of it…Check in on the blog in August.

3. Special thanks this time to:

Evelyn Brealey for being a great co-trainer, to Kirsten Havemann and Alberto who were not only great hosts in Copenhagen but fabulous company. Thanks once again to Adam Fletcher who inspires and supports me and sends his fascinating books and articles which challenge and develop my ideas about the participation of children and young people. Visit his blog www.youngerworld.org. Thanks to Sarah Newton who has just launched a new magnificent blog. Sarah is always a great friend and support. Get to her blog for more on living and working harmoniously with young people today. Thanks also to Abraham, Catherine, Elenor, Evelyn, Kirsty, Pete, Sara, Steve, Tara and Rania - the ten people with whom I've completed coaching sessions since the last newsletter.