Image Text: News in Brief - Vol 4 (April 2021) A year without international travel hasn't slowed us down! On the left are two polaroids of Ugandan men in a classroom environment surrounded by large pages of handwritten notes stuck to the walls

News in Brief – Vol 4 (April 2021)

By / / Charity News
Mick, a grandfather aged white guy is smiling at the camera from a coveted aisle seat of the plane. He’s wearing a black and white checked shirt with a black T-shirt underneath and black glasses frames. He’s so coordinated he even blends in with the black seats!

It’s been 12 whole months 🗓 since Mick boarded a flight to Brazil 🇧🇷 – little did we know that would be the only overseas visit by SFAC for the year. The world went into lockdown just after Mick returned (we don’t think the two things are connected!!) 😳

But that has not meant things have stopped, although they have virtually (!) changed. Our work has relied on the wonders of the internet, connecting us to people all around the world 🌍 Increasing our online training has allowed us to reach more people – in fact, over a couple of months Mick delivered workshops in Brazil, India, USA and UK, whilst Dan worked with organisations in Europe, Sierra Leone and Caitlin ran a Protective Behaviours course with participants from 10 different countries (Australia, Thailand, Lesotho, Uganda, USA, Paraguay, the Philippines, India, Morocco and UK!)

Like so many, we’ve been racking up the zoom minutes 💻 rather than the 🛩 air miles!!

2021 will see us become film stars 🎥 as we record training videos and courses so we can reach more people with or without reliable internet (and with or without ‘Sorry, you are on mute!’). 

Mick says he’s not missing flying but is missing visiting places and people…so we plan on sending him via boat 🚣🏼 for his next overseas visit!!!

👀 A little peek behind the scenes 👀

We ran our second online Protective Behaviours course in February with 13 participants representing organisations working in 8 different countries. Can you identify them from their flags?!

This is what Caitlin’s preparation work looked like before the first session!

You can check your flag knowledge at the bottom of this post!

a photo and a white sticky note on a yellow background. Both are stuck to the background with blue washi tape. The sticky note has "SFAC in UGANDA (no flights or quarantine required!) handwritten on it. The photo shows Joseph, a Ugandan man sitting behind a desk looking thoughtful and resting his chin in one hand. He's listening to another Ugandan man who's standing and speaking. He's wearing a black, white and grey striped t-shirt and grey trousers. The surrounding walls are covered in large sheets of paper with handwritten texts and drawings all over them. - Clearly they've been busy!

Recently SFAC contractor and local practitioner, Joseph Luganda, ran some training with 🇺🇬 Ugandan 🇺🇬 organisation, VCDF.

Here’s what VCDF’s very own Joseph had to say about what they got up to and how it’s made a difference to their work.

💬 During the training, we appreciated the usefulness of essential information as a critical tool in the development of the child care plan but also a tool that guides decision making process.

We developed a child and family assessments tools contextualised to VCDF operations. Secondly, analysed and contextualised government assessment tools to VCDF operations.

The current contribution of SFAC to VCDF at the time when the entire world is facing unprecedented Covid-19 Pandemic is indeed key in seeing every child, especially the needy, enjoy the full potential of every child’s value and future aspirations. As VCDF team, we would like to thank the entire SFAC team for your contribution in enabling our activities. More especially for the financial facilitation that enabled the five days training. As a team, we would like to acknowledge the down to earth skills and knowledge transfer to VCDF team by Joseph Luganda. 💬                      Joseph Ayesiga

🥳🎉 Celebrations and Congratulations are in order! 🥳🎉

Nigel Priestly, one of our wonderful legal volunteers, has been awarded an MBE in honour of his services to children and families particularly in the area of adoption and kinship care.

We’d love for you to join us in congratulating Nigel so share your favourite/best happy dance or congratulations gif or emoji in the comments below!

{Video Description: Nigel is wearing a bright yellow tie (and you know SFAC loves its bright, happy yellow!), white shirt and charcoal suit and sitting on a blue sofa speaking to camera}

🚀SFAC’s 2021 Superstar Fundraisers Get Off to a Flying Start! 🚀

Huge thanks go to Eddie and Kim for setting up their birthday fundraisers on Facebook. Not only did they make the most of their special “lockdown” day but, thanks to their fabulous friends, they also exceeded their targets 👏🏽👏🏿👏🏻

Collectively their fantastic efforts enable us to keep two of our most important annual professional memberships up to date so that we can work safely and care expertly.

If you want to find out more about becoming an SFAC Superstar, have a look at our Get Involved page or if you like covering long distances in short time frames the Virtual Virgin Money London Marathon could be right up your street (literally!)

If you think you could cover 26 miles (that’s 42km for the metric measurers!) in 24 hours ⏰ this October then we have just the adventure for you!

This year, for the first time ever, SFAC has 3 places in the Virgin Money Virtual London Marathon 🎉 We’d love you to have one of those places and to have fun raising funds for us while you run (or walk/jog/cartwheel  /crawl!)

Interested?! Need more details? 🙋🏿 Contact Hannah 📧 info@sfac.org.uk

👀 Wondering what the deal is with Image Descriptions?! 👀

We’ve had some questions❓ about why we started including image and video descriptions on our posts 🤷🏻 so thought we’d give them their very own post!

One of our values at SFAC is “Accessibility” – when we first started this was focussed on two key aspects:

💛 Making sure finance wasn’t a barrier to someone being able to participate in our training, and

💙 Working hard to present our training in a way that could be understood by anyone regardless of whether they had degrees, high school education or even whether they could read and write.

As we’ve listened👂🏾 to feedback, learned new things and reflected on this value, we’ve realised there is so much more to it and we have a loooooong way to go before we can really consider ourselves as an “accessible” organisation

One of our little steps🚶🏽‍♀️towards this big goal ✅ is to add image descriptions so those who use screen readers can experience and engage with our online work more fully. Lots of people use screen readers for all kinds of reasons and if we don’t describe the visual side of our posts they’re missing out on a huge amount of information.

Our next step is to make sure all of the images on our website also have appropriate descriptions. We’re trying to make them fun where we can so we hope you enjoy!

To all our friends and followers who have (and continue to) find our content inaccessible, we are so sorry for our lack of action on this before. If there are things we can do to make it easier for you please do let us know. Of course, we’ll continue to do our own research and work on how we can improve as well.

So having said all that… Here it is – today’s image description (we’re feeling the pressure to make it a good one!)

{Image Description: Caitlin, a 40 something, white woman with dark blonde (mousy?!) hair wears red and blue glasses and dangly white earrings with a blue floral pattern. She’s smiling (only a little – she’s not too sure about this photo situation!) at the camera and pointing to a handwritten sign. The sign is written in yellow, blue and green texta and reads “Have you been reading (and maybe even enjoying?!) our image descriptions?!?”). The wall behind Caitlin is an unintentional “feature” wall – highly textured in shades of beige and tan with tiny scraps of wall paper still clinging to it – clearly we don’t do influencer style interiors shots at SFAC!!! The photo is digitally taped to a yellow background with blue washi tape. The washi tape has a squiggly pattern on it}

😳 Can you believe we’re already a 1/4 of the way through the year?! 😳

As we turned the calendar into the second quarter we did a quick review of our work so far and thought we’d share this (really) quick video update 📹 Have to admit, as a tiny team navigating a pandemic we’re pretty proud of these numbers! 🎉

Keep an eye out here or on our social media to hear some of the stories behind the stats… 👀

Wondering if you guessed the flags correctly?!

 

Belize Brazil 🇧🇷  Uganda 🇺🇬  UK 🇬🇧  Lesotho 🇱🇸  Ethiopia 🇪🇹  Romania 🇷🇴  and Tanzania 🇹🇿

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