This feels like the start of a confession - Followers forgive me it's been a whole month since my last blog post - and that's not because I've been sunning myself in Spain or camping in Suffolk (although I did spend a week doing both of those). It's because at Children Unite HQ (shed in garden, cup of tea at hand) we're gearing up for the start of our first campaign so I've decided to write a monthly post instead of a weekly one. Ironically, the more I have to report, the less time I have to report it!
But I've also been busy because - WE GOT IT! We won the final of X Factor (see last post!) so I'm in the middle of the equivalent of signing record deals (completing application forms and finalising budgets - sounds a lot less interesting doesn't it!). I've had to halve the budget for the project in Nepal which has been quite a feat, but we got it!! We will be co-ordinating a year's research project with our partners in Nepal, CWISH, that looks at the issue of the sexual abuse of child domestic workers. I'm particularly pleased that there's a strong participatory element to the research, two of the researchers will be young people (former child domestic workers), there will be an advisory group of young people that will be consulted throughout the project and, in an exciting twist, some of the advisory group members will be turning the research findings into a 20 minute film that will be broadcast to the community. I particularly like this last element because I've been involved in turning boring UN documents into 'children-friendly' reports (written in children-friendly language) so that children can understand them. But what do you do when you want to feedback your findings to children (and adults) who don't read? You do it in film!
As for the campaign - it's shaping up. We will be launching it in November, we will be targeting the UK Government who have been shamefully unsupportive of the ILO's new Convention on Domestic Work, we will be using rubber gloves. I'll say no more at this point. But we will have a website, a Facebook profile and I’ll start tweeting again as we get closer to November (so I’m working on those things too).
Despite a few summer hiccups (our accountant went AWOL & my computer died), Children Unite is thriving; autumn is looking busy. Over the summer I’ve been swinging between a week of holiday, then a week of frenetic budget writing etc, another week of holiday (although camping ain’t much of a rest), then another week of designing our website and more budgeting...and so on. To be honest I’m a bit worried about the autumn, when everything is supposed to be starting and I’ll need to be at full throttle...but at some point in the next 6 months I’ll be going back to Nepal and the thought of the Himalayas always calms my nerves. That and a nice cuppa tea (with biscuit of course!).
