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It’s day three, and today we donned our smartest clothes to see the British High Commissioner, Martin Shearman.
Meeting the British High Commissioner
In a really positive meeting, he congratulated us on what he described as our “culturally sensitive” approach of talking to the locals and people in the know about what we want to achieve in Uganda. A common problem here is organisations just transplanting western ideas, rather than listening to what the local people really need. And we would be making a mistake if we simply replicated another charity’s model – ultimately our aim is to set up a project that no one else is doing and is really going to make a difference to the lives of abandoned babies. I’m immensely proud of our team – we have achieved so much in a short space of time. My wingman, Brian, continues to ask exactly the right questions, and his contacts have managed to set up meetings with the great and the good here. His dedication and passion for this project never ceases to amaze me – I have utmost respect for his opinion, and we would not be where we are now without his invaluable advice. And our Saff has pulled off a miracle – after producing weekly video updates on Bebo’s The Gap Year she promised never to attempt to upload a video in Africa ever again (the slowness and unreliability of the connection make it one of the most time-consuming jobs ever) but now she is doing it every day! Last night was a real test of her patience – after waiting 3 hours to upload a video, she discovered it hadn’t worked and had to start all again. Ouch! But it’s up now, and we really hope you enjoy the videos. We feel they give a great insight into what we are trying to do, so all those hours Saff spends watching a timeline is worth it. We would love to know what you think of our videos and welcome any suggestions.
Counting down the minutes
Tomorrow we are giving ourselves a much-needed day off. Brian is a fishing fanatic and has been looking forward to a spot of angling on the Nile all week, while I can’t wait to spend some time with the kids at Sanyu. See you on Sunday, folks, and please do keep those questions coming.
Show us your support and become a fan on Facebook – http://www.childsifoundation.org/go/facebook/planning
Hi there I’m Saffron and I shall be heading out to Uganda in a few days with Lucy and Brian to film the planning trip. As Producer / Director I have worked on a variety of entertainment programmes for BBC and Channel 4. Recently I was a P/D on “The Gap Year” for Bebo, an interactive online travel adventure following 6 travellers all round the world on the highs and lows of a 6 month Gap Year.
Saffron - our Producer
Africa and I have a bit of a history, like Brian the continent never let go with me either. I first landed there back in ‘98 when I went on an overland trip through Uganda and Kenya in my university summer holiday. Since then I have been back several times and on Gap Year I travelled for 6 months filming through various parts of South, East, North and West Africa. I am really chuffed to be using my skills to help this amazing project get off the ground.
In our three weeks in Uganda we really want to feel like you are there with us through the entire trip right from the moment we arrive in Uganda. This is going to be an important trip and we want YOU to be involved.
So for now it’s on to finalising our shooting schedule, checking through the kit, praying the internet in Uganda is up to it and packing the well travelled rucksack once more!
7 days to go!
In 14 days time, we are going out to Uganda for 3 weeks to conduct a planning trip.
Our aim is to build a centre of excellence to provide life saving care to abandoned babies and return children to their own families or to foster or adoptive families. This trip is going to determine just how we are going to deliver our promise.
We are taking Brian Waller, our most capable social work adviser who is now working with us to develop our social care approach. He has worked in Uganda and has years of experience in working with families and young children.
21 days is not a lot of time especially as we need to find the answers to some fundamental questions including:
Why are babies being abandoned?
More to the point why do mothers abandon their babies? Is there anyway we could help prevent mothers abandoning their babies in the first place? Tackle the root cause of abandonment and work with mothers to prevent abandonment and ultimately be the people they turn to instead of abandoning their newborn baby in a derelict building?
William from the Sanyu Babies' Home
What?
We now need to decide exactly what extra services we are going to provide beyond the immediate care of newly abandoned babies. Should we, for example, design our centre to accommodate mothers too on a daily or residential basis? We need to talk to government, existing projects and, if possible, mothers themselves about our plans and see where the gaps in provisions are in childcare.
Where?
Location is key. Our project must be firmly based in a local community. It has to be genuinely supported by the local people and local agencies and feel “African” and not something transplanted from outside the continent. If we cannot achieve that ‘buy in” from the very beginning our project will never be sustainable.
How?
We want to find foster or adoptive homes for abandoned children but this is not so common an idea as it is here. It would be easier to look after them long term in an institution but we don’t believe being another orphan statistic is best for the child. Our challenge is to find existing and reliable charities who do this and family support work well and who could work in partnership with us.
And there’s more…
Every day we want to upload a daily video and blog to keep supporters updated on the progress of our project but we need to see if this works on a practical level. We are lucky enough to take out Saffron Jackson, Producer of The Gap Year who has travelled around Africa and is an expert at filming, shooting and uploading videos so if anyone can do it Saffron can but it will be an interesting exercise to see if the idea in theory works in reality. We’ll find out soon enough…
What you can do…
We need your input as this is your charity and we want you to get involved. We want to have a conversation with you so please send us your questions, add your comments, send us ideas, give us advice and support and help us create a centre which we can all be proud of.
This weekend, I made my Tada list (to do list courtesy of 37signals.com) public to the world – I did it quietly by hiding it amongst a vast array of links on our Facebook Group, but still it was out there for at least 700 people to see.
The list was so scarily long it took two and a half hours just to go through it at last night’s regular Monday evening team meeting.
I am not trying to suggest I am busier than any other person setting up an organisation or that I want to have a “list-off” with anyone. But I do want to ensure our charity is being as operationally transparent as possible. That is one of our core promises.
Operational transparency is of course the whole idea behind Child’s i Foundation’s communication model of utilising social media – blogging, posting videos, uploading photos and tweeting etc. But all of those tools are to a certain degree moderated by our time and the amount of newsworthy content we have to report (well to be fair our tweets are sometimes closer to general enthusiasm than news:).
But by publishing our Tada lists, we hope to open out our day-to-day activities to the world. To show what it takes to get this project off the ground, to make it work and also where and when we need our supporters to step in and step up. It’s no small undertaking building and sustaining a babies’ home in Uganda – and our ambitions are huge but totally achievable with the help of others.
Everything we have done so far has been due to our supporters offering us their skills, expertise, advice and time. Last week we asked for a Graphic Designer. Step forward Georgie Hewitt, who is going to design the Undress For Uganda promotional material. In the past week we have also had over 60+ TV people offer their skills and time. Our “charity 2.0″ or “collaboration model” is starting to work.
We have deliberately not asked people for money during these early teething days (actually we can take money so if you really want to give so don’t be afraid), because we know we have to be patient. We want people to feel part of this project, ask us questions – challenge us – and get involved.
Our personal tada lists are here:
More to follow …
Today Michelle and I were signing off our fundraising strategy, but we’ve hit a huge snag. We’ve just discovered it could take up to 9 weeks to get a code from HMRC – and that means we can’t activate our Justgiving account. We didn’t want to make the website active before we had a means for our supporters to donate, particularly because we’re developing a beautiful ‘Buy A Brick’ application, which will allow everyone to buy virtual brick to help build our home.
So should we launch Child’s i Foundation to the world without an online donation mechanism?
Just as we were puzzling it out, my phone rang. It was Deborah Meaden. What followed was an amazing 20-minute conversation, which I find hard to believe actually happened. She told me she had read my proposal, and was incredibly impressed with what I had accomplished and what an impressive team I had put together. I had turned the idea I pitched to her in the lift (apparently ‘very well’) into a reality. Her only remaining question was whether anyone else was already doing this kind of thing out in Uganda, but as our priority is resettling our children into families, we have a USP.
On the phone to Deborah Meaden
I then took the opportunity to pick her brains over the current quandary – should we launch without the donation mechanism in place? She replied with advice she had never given before – Yes, launch. Commercially, she would never suggest us to go ahead but as our aim is to create a worldwide community of supporters, she felt we should focus on building up the community, then launch ‘Buy A Brick’ at a later stage, when we’d generated lots of support and interest.
As for her involvement in our project, she is already working with Action Against Hunger. She is a lady of her word and when she says she is going to commit to something she puts in 100%, so she can’t commit to our project as well. I really respect her and wish her lots of luck on her trip out to visit one of AAH’s projects in the New Year. She did say she is always at the end of the phone if I needed advice, which is extremely comforting to know. Thank you, Deborah. You made my week.
The USP of the Child’s I Foundation is that we are harnessing the power of the internet to connect, engage and inform supporters.
As my web skills extend to being able to check the weather and being addicted to Facebook, I urgently needed to put together a team of experts to make this happen. Step forward Kirsty Stephenson, Matthew Knight and Nick Hall at Endemol Digital. They are now our digital team, who will be using open source tools, web 2.0, image hosting, video streaming, community tools, social networking, crowdsourcing and micropatronage. And no, I don’t know what they mean, either – except that, thanks to them, you’ll all soon be able to see exactly where your donations are going and how they are saving lives.
I have a lot to learn and incredibly relieved to have such an amazing team on board.
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