One of our supporters from the UK asked us a brilliant question about how we find families for our children. This video from our fabulous social work department hopefully goes some way to explaining the process.
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As 2011 draws to an end we just wanted to say a big thank you for making 2011 such a fantastic year.
We could not do this without you.
We are proud to share with you our new mission statement video (thanks to Ian Warren) which shows the problem of baby abandonment in Uganda and how as a worldwide community, we are are finding loving families and giving children a future.
If you want to get involved, here are ten simple ways to really make a difference.
1) Watch our new mission statement video and share with your friends and family what we’ve achieved together.
2) Come and meet us in person at our Meet Up on Thursday 12th January at the Golden Fleece Pub in Bank at 7pm. For more details email martha@childsifoundation.org
3) So far 93 supporters around the world give to us every month which is our lifeline. We really need more generous people to set up a regular gifts to ensure we can run our babies home. Please set up a regular gift here
4) Join our Facebook Group and invite your friend to join. Here we share with you all the families you help to make and regular update you on the events at Malaika Babies Home.
5) Join our mailing list and receive our regular newsletter.
6) Please think of us next time you are buying a present for a friend or loved one. We can’t think of a better gift than garbage disposal for a week!
7) Thinking of making a new years resolution to give up smoking or running a marathon to get fit? Why not set up a Just Giving sponsorship page and ask all your friends to donate – that way you will have to do it!
We rely on a worldwide community of volunteers to help run our charity. If you have the time and skills please sign up to get involved.9) If you are inspired by Hazel Buck and her Community fundraising team in Sussex and want to set up your very own fundraising committee for Child’s i Foundation please email hazel@childsifoundation.org
10) If you have a digital camera that you don’t need anymore we really really need one! Please contact lucy@childsifoundation.org
Thank you and we wish you a very Happy New Year.
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Since we opened our doors 18 months ago we have placed 53 children into families and proved that with good social work it is possible to place children into families. In fact the average stay at Malaika Babies Home is 4.9 months. This is a real achievement as research shows that any longer than 6 months in residential care can lead to long term psychological damage.
Our home was full and we needed to find families for children so we launched a mass media campaign to promote local adoption and it was a great success with over 100 Ugandan families contacting us and undergoing assessment.
Deciding on whether the families are suitable is a huge decision which we did not want to make alone so we established an adoption panel (first of it’s kind in Uganda) chaired by the Ministry of Gender to make the decision collectively.
The panel consists of representatives including Caroline Bankusha from the Kampala City Council Probation Service, Gad Mfitundinda Hashaka from the Police Child Protection and Family Unit, Rachael Arinaitwe, a lawyer from ANPPCAN Uganda. Mark Riley from the Ministry and Christina Sempebwa an adoptive parent.
The forth of our adoption panels took place this week, with panel members reviewing assessments carried out by our team of Social Workers. So far we have had 17 parents approved by the panel and as a result 15 children from Malaika have been adopted.
But it doesn’t stop there. As a result of our mass media campaign, our adoption panel and the fact that 54% of all our children are returned back to their families. (Which makes a lot of sense considering that 60% of children in care have families) we have empty beds.
We’re proving that children do not need to stay in long term residential care and it is possible to find them families so the next challenge we faced was working with the agencies who received the children so they would call on us to take the children into care.
Currently we have 6 empty beds so we decided to hold an open day for the Police who are the agency who receive most of the at risk, abandoned babies and children in Kampala.
Yesterday 18 members of the police child protection unit came to visit our home for the first time and we had a brilliant day.
They were very impressed with our carers and how happy the children were and saw for themselves how we go about finding families for children so fingers crossed that next time they receive a child under 2 years old who needs emergency care and protection we will be getting a call.
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Having been asked to write a blog about our Community Fundraising Team, it’s hard to know where to start. Probably the best place is at the beginning – just over three years ago when my daughter Lucy came home and announced that she was giving up her TV career and going to set up a home for abandoned babies in Kampala.
I’d always enjoyed putting on local events to raise funds for sports club etc, so it seemed natural to get a few friends together who I knew were keen supporters of Child’s i Foundation, and form a small committee.
Our first event was ‘Undress for Uganda’ – a clothes-swapping party where everyone brings along good-quality items of clothing to sell, which we soon got other people copying. With a £5 entrance fee (which includes a glass of wine!) and most items on sale at £5, they always prove to be really fun, sociable evenings. At our first, we also had a reflexologist and someone painting nails, also at £5 a pop, and we raised £1,081.
This spurred us on and our committee grew from four to eight. One of our committee is a keen walker and suggested organising a walk around our local Ashdown Forest for friends, families and dogs on a Sunday morning. We have since made this a regular event (Spring and Autumn) and the band of walkers grows every time. We charge every adult £5 and organise it so that it ends near to a local pub for a pre-Sunday lunch drink.
We also hold a spring children’s “nearly-new sale” each year. We hire the local village hall and leaflet-drop locally asking for good-as-new babies’ and children’s clothing and toys. The sale itself is growing in popularity as more people get to hear of it, but the advantage is that we are able to send any remaining good clothing, equipment and toys direct to Malaika Babies’ Home. In fact, nothing goes to waste as any clothing left from Undress for Uganda along with the Children’s nearly-new sale, gets take to a car boot sale by two of our committee members where the majority gets sold.
It’s always a challenge to come up with new ways to raise funds and, in April this year, we held our first Quiz Night. We managed to persuade a colleague, Chris, to take on the job of MC for the evening, found a very reasonable caterer and got our husbands to run the bar and the evening bought in just over £1,000. This will definitely become an annual event.
We sometimes find that people approach us for help in putting on an event, and we’re always pleased to lend a hand. This year, one of our supporters, Brent suggested holding a cricket match, Rotherfield v Child’s i. He was home from Japan for a month and, in a very short time, put the game together, coercing (in some cases) cricketers who had not played for several years. It was a beautiful summer’s day, tea was provided by all the players and a raffle and quiz rounded off the day. Taking into account the short time it took to organise the event, an amazing £450 was raised by two enthusiastic teams of cricketers keen to do it all again next year.
This brings us to the end of the summer when, two years ago, we held our first Golf Day. With two of the committee being keen golfers, we decided to rally our friends, find a course and put together a golf day. It was quite a feat in the end and we were grateful for all the help we could get! However, undaunted, we have just held another Golf Day and can honestly say it was a great success, bringing in just over£2,500. The players are asking for another next year, but bi-annually is enough for us organisers.
All the family have got involved. Tea Tunes and Talent is the brainchild of Jo Farrelley, Lucy’s great aunt. A talented pianist and member of Groombridge Amateur Dramatic Society, Jo wanted to raise some money for Child’s i Foundation and realised that a lot of elderly people prefer to go out in the afternoon rather than have to come home after dark. She spread the word and soon had lots of local support and set out a programme of popular music and sketches along with an interval with delicious cakes and a cup of tea. A sing-song at the end rounds off the event and inevitably a few tears are shed by the audience as they sing along to old favourites. She has now organised 2 of these events and we are hoping that there will be many more to come!
So that just about sums up our year. We have learnt a lot, especially to stick with what we know. Being a local community group, we also have to be careful not to approach the same people all the time, so try to cover different groups and not rely on friends – we want to keep them! However, at the end of the day, the charity sells itself. Its transparency, and the fact that supporters feel they know the children they are helping, makes it so easy to encourage them to donate. Our mantra is to make sure we “Keep the Fun in Fundraising” and think that is what we do.
Thanks to Sharon, Lyn, Janis, Liz, Julie, Delny, Jeannie, Vicki and Gillian for their tremendous support. They have raised an incredible £7,043.33 so far this year which pays for all the home for a whole month.
If you would like to put on your own fundraising event in your local community please do drop me a line hazel@childsifoundation.org
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Last year, we piloted our Mother and Baby Centre to see if we could help prevent abandonment by providing support to vulnerable mothers and their babies. The centre was a success and we learnt a lot, but the main lesson was that the women who came to our centre from the local community benefitted a lot more than the six mothers who lived with us residentially. So, after much discussion with experts and stakeholders, we have decided to make our prevention service non-residential and support mothers in their homes, enabling us to help even more women in crisis.
All of our project are pilots. In fact, I was told not to even call it a pilot, but view it more as a ‘proof of concept’ – we want to prove our concept works and with your support, we’re really demonstrating that transitional care is possible in Uganda. We had no idea whether we could resettle children back into families, but we’ve managed to place 43 children into families after an average stay of five months. We were told this would be impossible, but now we are working closely with the government and we want to share our model of care to help other institutions provide transitional care as an alternative to long-term institutionalisation.
We’ve learnt that there are many young mothers out there ready to abandon their babies but, given the choice and a little support, we can prevent this happening. So many mothers turn up at our centre that we always have an on-call social worker on hand to give guidance, support and advice. Sometimes, when the family has rejected the mother because of the pregnancy, all it takes is a third party to help them come to terms with the new baby and often all a mother needs is a small amount of money to help with a few months’ rent.
If the mother is truly destitute, we’ve exhausted all other options and the child is at risk, we admit the child into Malaika but encourage the mother to spend as much time with her baby as she can, learning how to be a good parent. At the same time, our social work team work with them to help change their circumstances so they can afford to keep their baby.
Reunited with Mum
But this is not the end of our intervention. When the child goes back home to their family, we work with them for up to a year to ensure the child is safe. We have some incredible Family Support Workers, who visit families frequently and teach them good parenting. Here is a film made by our new volunteer Tom Hollings about the work our Family Support Worker does with one of her families:
As usual, we couldn’t do this without you. Thank you to everyone who has made Child’s i Foundation what it is today, and thank you for continually supporting our work and being part of a community who believe the best place for a child is in a family.
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Promoting Adoption in Uganda … with the help of our worldwide community.
Adoption here in Uganda is relatively uncommon and, sadly, there is a real stigma attached to it. A brilliant journalist, Angela Kintu, wrote a very brave article in the Sunday Vision about her personal experiences of adoption and backlash she endured when she chose to adopt her baby. It received so much attention she wrote another article about how adoption changed her life.
Once children arrive at our centre, we do everything we can to trace their families but, when we are unsuccessful, our aim is to place them in new families as soon as possible. The purpose of our pilot media campaign was to see if we could change the mindsets of Ugandans to encourage them to adopt instead of hundreds of children languishing in orphanages across Uganda. We knew we were not going to change minds over night, but we wanted to create a debate. This is how we did it…
In the spirit of Child’s i Foundation, we created a media campaign using the time, love and money of our worldwide community of volunteers. This campaign would not have been possible without Martha Parsons, an ITN Journalist from the UK, who volunteered five months of her time and expertise to produce the campaign.
Wonderwoman Martha
First of all, we needed a website – step forward Anu Gupta, a brilliant web developer from the UK who gave up his Easter to build (thanks to Wordpress) our Ugandan’s Adopt website for free.
We filled our website with powerful videos to encourage adoption, produced by media volunteers from around the world who come and give their TV expertise for free. Thanks to Ian Warren, Kirsty Mitchell, Katie Cochrane, Josie Gallo, Barbara Graham, Liam Stewart, Keren Riley and Manu Lorenzone. This powerful video was filmed by Keren Riley and produced by Manu Lorenzone and Martha Parsons.
We wanted to give Ugandan parents adoption packs to take home full of information about the process and an expression of interest form. For those, we thank designer Becci Buckley, who designed them.
Adoption brochure
Our Billboard campaign can only be described as a truly collaborative effort. We had 24 hours to come up with a campaign idea, so we posted a plea on our Facebook group to find an advertising creative. Creative Gordon Roberts stepped forward and worked on a brilliant campaign idea “Love is All They Need…Adopt A Child’ while Jessica Rodriguez and Stijn Aelbers offered their time to take pictures of our children.
One of our billboards in Kampala
George and Desire (Joey’s Parents) offered to front our campaign and we paid for a designer to design the billboard. Alliance Media very kindly gave us the Billboards for free and we had to pay for printing and flighting, which came to £831 and designer Martha Anyango Oringo very generously gave us a 50% discount.
Next we wanted to hit the airwaves and who better to ask than the incredible Dave Wartnaby (remember the guy who came out to Uganda and set up a studio on his bed?) Dave is the voice of Capital FM in Uganda and, over the past 18 months, has not charged them a penny for his lovely voice – instead he asked them to give us the airtime instead. He also persuaded Jo McCrostie at This Is Global agency to write our script, while Dave produced our radio adverts. Thanks also to Jackie Lumbasi, who is constantly on Capital FM promoting our adoption campaign and the guys at Radio Simba, who gave us a very reasonable price to promote our campaign.Our adverts promoting adoption on Uganda’s leading TV station NTV have been very successful, and we’ve received many calls from prospective adoptive parents. Here are both our adverts produced by Manu Lorenzone and Martha Parsons.
Our hour-long NTV debate show with Mr James Kaboggoza, Desire our adoptive parents and our social worker Barbra was hugely informative and the phone lines were jammed with callers wanting to know more. We are very grateful for Henry Kyomu for filming and Ben Ssebuufu for presenting on the vidoes.
We could not have done this campaign without the backing of the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, ANPPCAN, CRANE, Families For Children and Carol Bankusha, who have helped us develop this pilot over the past year.I think we can confidently say it has been incredibly successful. Every one of you who has given your love, time and money should be very proud of what you’ve achieved. We already have 60 families being assessed, but this is just the beginning. The mindset towards adoption is not going to change overnight, but the 60 families who have already volunteered may well encourage even more families to step forward so we can find homes for more children in desperate need of love and stability.
Next stop is presentations, so if you would like our team to visit your business or church and do a presentation, please do get in touch email adoption@childsifoundation.org
or call 0791777319
Many thanks – we couldn’t do this without you
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I originally came to Child’s i Foundation just over a year ago, after I completed the “Get Involved” form on the website – I got a call asking if I’d like to use my skills and, within eight weeks, I was at Malaika. I was originally due to stay for six months and, in that time, I was given the opportunity to set up the Social Work Department. This was a hugely exciting prospect, because the charity relies on good social workers to place all the children in their care within 3-6 months of admission to avoid potential long-term damage.
The Social Work Department officially came into being in October 2010, when I took on a volunteer social worker to assist with the work to promote the de-institution of children. Since those humble beginnings, we have grown – I now manage five full-time social workers, a family support worker, plus two student social workers – and our department is constantly expanding.
Each social worker has a varied caseload of up to 15 children, including babies currently resident in the care home, children who have been resettled to their birth family and assessments of prospective Ugandan adoptive parents. I train the social workers and think my proudest moment was when I was told I was not needed – in fact, I was not wanted – when assessing families because my team couldn’t get a truthful answer with me. They are all more than equipped to handle whatever comes to them. This means I am now pretty much office-based, while the team travel up to 3500km a month ensuring all the children we resettle are safe.
Our new Family Support Worker, Lydia, has a caseload of 10 children who have been resettled and require support in the home. Together we have developed a programme that addresses parenting issues that are culturally sensitive, such as protecting children from malaria and keeping babies ‘wet and warm’. The child mortality rate in Uganda is very high, with nearly 1 in 5 children not making it to their fifth birthday, so providing practical support and advice to parents is essential.
The student social workers work cases alongside our social workers. I believe it essential that we have a good student programme and relationship with the top Ugandan Universities such as Makerere, as these are the future social workers who will promote change towards the de-institution of children in Uganda.
Our Mary doing supervision
We constantly have desperate family members trying to abandon their children with us. Most of the time, all they need is support and some time to enable them to make the right decision to prevent abandonment in the first place. We always have a social worker on duty to work with families at risk and our prevention work would not be possible without developing good links with the community and other charities working with at-risk children. We have developed a very good reputation for preventative work and, as a result, we receive daily phone calls from other NGO’s, hospitals and the police requesting that one of our team assist them on an assessment of a family.
As well as the daily management of the social work department, I arrange a bi-monthly adoption panel, which is the first of its kind in Uganda, and is supported by the Ministry of Gender (the Government department in charge of children). Following a successful adoption media campaign, the department is now working with 50 Ugandan families who have expressed an interest in adoption. I am also in the process of organising Open Days at Malaika Babies home for prospective Ugandan adoptive parents, which is essential in order to promote that children are best placed in family based care.
I am also part of the senior management here at CiF, which means that I ensure that the objectives of the social work department work in conjunction with the organisation’s strategy and future development.
Since the department began, I can proudly say that we have resettled 30 children to their birth family with an average stay of only four months, six children have been placed in Ugandan adoptive families and we have been able to prevent 51 children being brought into care, instead remaining at home with their family. This is growing every day and makes my job more than worthwhile.
We Make Families, Not Orphans
If you are an Social Worker experienced in Fostering and Adoption and would like to donate 6 months of your life to set up an “Emergency Foster Care Pilot” please email your CV to Lucy Buck.
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Our annual report is coming up and we’d like to find out from you how well we’ve done this year, how we can continue to support you with the information we share and how we can improve and thrive as an organisation, with your help.
Your insights will help us be the kind of charity we want to be – one that’s created out of a community of people who care.
We’ve set up a very quick survey and would really appreciate it if you could take a couple of minutes to complete it.
Thank you so much,
Lucy x
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LUNGES, walks and core strength exercises….
This is just a day in the life of Child’s i Foundation’s dedicated supporter Rachael McCool, who is taking on Mt Kilimanjaro later this month.
Rachel, who lives in Hesltington, York, said she has “dragged various people up mountains” around England and Wales, and hit the gym in preparation for her challenge of a lifetime.
She said: “I’ve been working on core strength and endurance rather than speed. I want to be confident in myself without underestimating the task at hand. I’m not coming home without getting to the top!”
Super supporter Rachael McCool
Rachael got involved with the climb after reading an appeal for climbers to take on one of the world’s highest mountains for Child’s i Foundation.
Her fundraising has exceeded her expectations, and the money is still rolling in.
She will start her climb on July 29.
Rachael said: “I’m currently breaking in my second pair of boots after going out in the rain in the first pair and finding out they weren’t really very waterproof after all. Sleeping bag….check., appropriate walking clothes….check, bag big enough to fit in so if my legs fall off I can jump in and get taken the rest of the way up….check!!
“I’m so excited. It’s such a huge thing for me. I can’t believe how soon it is. It has all been a bit overwhelming and doesn’t seem entirely real. I think it’ll hit me when I get to Tanzania.”
Rachael, studied psychology at York University, and now works as a research assistant at the York Health Economics Consortium.She said she has been “completely blown away” by the support and generosity of friends and family and “couldn’t be more grateful”. She added: “Lucy has a lot to be proud of with Child’s I foundation and my best efforts would have been in vain were they not for such a wonderful, worthwhile charity and cause.
“My parents and family have been canvassing in my home town and have done a wonderful job and there have been donations from the most unexpected people and places.”
Rachael would like to visit the Malaika Babies Home in Kampala, Uganda, next year, saying it would be “like icing on the cake” for her incredible efforts.
To sponsor Rachael, visit www.justgiving.com/Rachael-McCool
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Child’s i Foundation’s grown by recognising the social worth of others and the contribution we can all make in it.
That combination of giving time, money and love is one that’s very, very important to us. It’s something we’re acutely aware of and feel very privileged to have from everyone that supports us.
Just recently our first babies home, Malaika babies home, had its first birthday. The value that went into creating this milestone is enormous and wonderful to see.
And it means a great deal to us that David Tait, our chairman, has been walking up Everest. He’s scaled more summits than that one by being such a big part of the contribution we’re all making together, of making Child’s i happen in his own way, instead of just running a meeting or two! And it’s a tremendous and inspiring achievement.
Big DT, little baby
We accept and depend on donations, but Child’s i shows how cool it can be to be involved in all sorts of ways, that it’s possible to make something special like Malaika happen by coming together.
The love, and time and attention as well as money that we get from supporters is immense so from me, too, thank you!
It’s what makes us special as a community together and it’s what propels us and enables us to make families not orphans, where we all belong and because of that, where we all make a difference.
Blogs for this section
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Finding families
Posted by Lucy Buck on January 30th, 2012CommentsOne of our supporters from the UK asked us a brilliant question about how we find families for our children. This video from our fabulous social work department hopefully goes some way to explaining the process. Read More →
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By a Community, for a Community
Posted by Lucy Buck on December 28th, 2011As 2011 draws to an end we just wanted to say a big thank you for making 2011 such a fantastic year. We could not do this without you. We are proud to share with you our new mission statement video (thanks to Ian Warren) which shows the problem of baby abandonment in Uganda and how as [...] Read More →
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Empty beds
Posted by Lucy Buck on December 2nd, 2011Since we opened our doors 18 months ago we have placed 53 children into families and proved that with good social work it is possible to place children into families. In fact the average stay at Malaika Babies Home is 4.9 months. This is a real achievement as research shows that any longer than 6 [...] Read More →
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Hazel Buck’s fundraising mantra
Posted by volunteer on November 28th, 2011Having been asked to write a blog about our Community Fundraising Team, it’s hard to know where to start. Probably the best place is at the beginning – just over three years ago when my daughter Lucy came home and announced that she was giving up her TV career and going to set up a [...] Read More →
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Get by with a little help from… our Family Support Workers
Posted by Lucy Buck on September 20th, 2011Last year, we piloted our Mother and Baby Centre to see if we could help prevent abandonment by providing support to vulnerable mothers and their babies. The centre was a success and we learnt a lot, but the main lesson was that the women who came to our centre from the local community benefitted a [...] Read More →
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Promoting adoption
Posted by Lucy Buck on August 16th, 2011Promoting Adoption in Uganda … with the help of our worldwide community. Adoption here in Uganda is relatively uncommon and, sadly, there is a real stigma attached to it. A brilliant journalist, Angela Kintu, wrote a very brave article in the Sunday Vision about her personal experiences of adoption and backlash she endured when she chose [...] Read More →
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A day in the life of our Social Work Department (written by Mary)
Posted by admin on August 12th, 2011I originally came to Child’s i Foundation just over a year ago, after I completed the “Get Involved” form on the website – I got a call asking if I’d like to use my skills and, within eight weeks, I was at Malaika. I was originally due to stay for six months and, in that [...] Read More →
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Tell us how we’re doing and help us to improve
Posted by Lucy Buck on August 1st, 2011Our annual report is coming up and we’d like to find out from you how well we’ve done this year, how we can continue to support you with the information we share and how we can improve and thrive as an organisation, with your help. Your insights will help us be the kind of charity we [...] Read More →
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I’ll make it to the top if it ‘Kili’s’ me!
Posted by admin on July 20th, 2011LUNGES, walks and core strength exercises…. This is just a day in the life of Child’s i Foundation’s dedicated supporter Rachael McCool, who is taking on Mt Kilimanjaro later this month. Rachel, who lives in Hesltington, York, said she has “dragged various people up mountains” around England and Wales, and hit the gym in preparation for her [...] Read More →
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A timely reminder and an Everest-sized thank you
Posted by AnneMcx on May 22nd, 2011Child’s i Foundation’s grown by recognising the social worth of others and the contribution we can all make in it. That combination of giving time, money and love is one that’s very, very important to us. It’s something we’re acutely aware of and feel very privileged to have from everyone that supports us. Just recently our [...] Read More →
