It’s our last day in Nairobi, so we thought we’d share with you some of our experiences. We’ve spent the last two weeks using the mornings to visit clinics where mums were collecting baby boxes and visiting mothers’ homes for follow-up surveys on their use of the boxes. We worked alongside the programming activities to collect photos and stories. Most afternoons were spent organising our material, writing blogs and any other comms content.

We also tried something new for Child.org, collecting contact details of the mothers to report back on how their photos and stories are used. We thought it would be nice to also send the families some of the pictures taken so they had their own copies. So now every mum photographed will have either a digital or hard copy of their photo. 

The placement has been very rewarding and varied, and we both agree that we’ve loved every minute (even spending an evening in hospital when Meli fell in a ditch). We have had such great support from the Child.org Nairobi team and it’s been so fun to go out in the field with Faith and Doreen and get to know them properly. Despite their reluctance, we have also been able to take photos and videos of the Child.org Nairobi team here to share more about the work they are doing.

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Silvia and Leonard insisted that their chicken be included in the photo ...and eventually Rona too

We have been able to collect 16 in-depth stories, the photos of 38 mums and 33 Team Mum tips, that will help the communications team with the Team Mum funding application that has been sent off to the Department for International Development. We are really excited about this campaign and hope our content will help launch it. Find out more about the appeal here.
 

We’ve loved collecting empowering and happy photos of these incredible mums and their invariably cute babies (and the occasional chicken). We have been so lucky to hear so many people’s stories, giving us a real insight into life here in Kenya and especially Nairobi. We are sure you will be seeing more content from us over the next few months, including the amazing Tyson’s story. Tyson volunteers in the Child.org Nairobi office helping Carrie with Ride Africa but has a long history with Child.org. 

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Amelia and Community Health Volunteer, Ammey enjoying Mendazi while out in the field for a home visit.

Finally, a bit about Kenyan culture and most importantly food! We’ve become hooked on Mendazi (pictured above), Kenyan deep fried cakes which we’ll be missing on our return to the UK. We have also decided we will be taking our ugali making skills back home with us. We’ve had a chance to learn a few words of Swahili, which has made our experience even more worthwhile because we were able to converse more with the mothers. Our attempts at pronunciation have given us a way to make them laugh whilst taking photos. It has also been really interesting to hear different perspectives and views on the politics and social system here, with the last election being only last year. 

To sum up, our Charity Fast-Track content and communications placement in Nairobi has been an incredible and worthwhile experience; we feel as though we’ve gathered some really useful communications material and spoken to some amazing women, as well as very much enjoying ourselves! Faith and Dorreen wanted to add, "The last two weeks with you guys have been amazing, time flew by very fast, we hope to see you again." 

TOP PHOTO: In the Child.org Nairobi Office: Amelia, Tyson, Faith, Rona, Doreen and Marti.

To find out more about this placement, you can read all of Amelia and Rona's blogs here. If you want to train yourself for a fantastic charity career, you should apply for Charity Fast-Track 2019! Find details here on the Utopy website.

In Kenya, only 51% of mothers and 36% of newborns receive postnatal care within the first 48 hours of birth. One of the goals of Child.org's baby box programme is “To find out if the baby box is a successful incentive for mothers to access postnatal care services in a health facility with the help of a skilled health professional." While they've been handing out the boxes and conducting the research, the Child.org Nairobi team have noticed an added difficultly in providing more mums with postnatal care. We realised that when mothers arrive at health clinics for postnatal check-ups and to receive their baby boxes, health professionals are prioritising pregnant women or those in labour instead of mothers with newborns.

The team realised that in order for the baby box pilot to be effective, we needed to offer some additional training for nurses and Community Health Volunteers (CHVs). The day's session has been designed to improve postnatal care by delivering in depth training on how to help mothers with breastfeeding and how to identify warning signs for mothers and babies, as well as providing more information about the baby box programme. This epitomises Child.org’s motto of We Do What Works.

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What happened during the day?

The programming team were so pleased that Dorcas, Senior Nursing Officer of Nairobi City Council, was able to attend to deliver sessions on general postnatal care for the nurses and community health volunteers (CHVs). Dorcas recently went to a three day national training course on postnatal care, so it was great for her to have the opportunity to cascade her knowledge so soon! Jo Aubrey, a lactation nurse and breastfeeding expert facilitated a breastfeeding session. Eight nurses and seven CHVs were able to attend and they were split up so that content could be tailored to their specific roles. 

Dorcas’ session with the nurses and CHVs provided information on what to look out for in mothers and babies after delivery. She also tested them on their knowledge, which made the session more interactive. Dorcas’ justified that postnatal care is important because it provides “a continuum of care” from pregnancy through to maternal and neonatal health.

Jo’s sessions were designed to train nurses and CHVs in how best to support breastfeeding mothers, through a combination of discussion, videos and role playing to provide information for mothers on topics such as latching and expressing breast milk. The interactive session was clearly very useful, as several participants said the information on effective breastfeeding was one of the most important things they got out of the day. 

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Why was the day a success?

John*, one of the nurses said that one of the most important things he learnt was that postnatal care should last for at least six weeks. Previously he thought postnatal care only lasted for two weeks. This was amazing to hear as it is a really important outcome from the training. Extended postnatal care means more women and babies will receive healthcare and potentially life-saving treatment. 

It was also great to see Child.org’s new nurse volunteer interns, Herine and Teresiah, at the training day after only being interviewed the day before! Herine really enjoyed the session as she is keen to specialise in maternal health and has her own 4 month old baby. She told us she learnt, “the importance of attachment during breastfeeding so that the baby feeds properly.”

The training day gave Child.org more insight into the realities of maternal care in the clinics. Nurses and CHVs told us about their real experiences in clinic. During the breastfeeding session, the nurses said that most mums do breastfeed and it is normally a neighbour or a family member rather than a healthcare professional who shows them techniques. Jo’s session was able to provide information to show mothers how to effectively and safely breastfeed.

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Several of the nurses and CHVs were keen to give us feedback and tell us how important the session was for them. Boaz one of the nurses working in Westlands clinic where Child.org gives out baby boxes said, “Very impressive presentations. Now we know the services we were giving were not completed without the important postnatal care.” 

The CHVs agreed that after the training they will be more observant and ask mothers more questions to identify warning signs. Chris, a CHV at Kangemi Health Centre, said the training was especially worthwhile and useful in providing information on how to check the breathing rate of a baby, and other signs that urgent medical treatment is required. Margaret, a CHV coordinator, was particularly impressed by the information on baby boxes as it will now be easy to explain to mothers about how they might use the box. 

Phoebe, who is the Ministry of Health appointed coordinator for CHVs in Westlands and Kangemi clinics, had a lot of praise for the training. She highlighted that she would like more Community Health Volunteers to undergo similar training so that, in her words, “more lives can be saved”. 

Amelia and Rona are on a Charity Fast-Track placement in Nairobi with the Child.org programming team. They will learn about how our comms team collects and uses stories and other content from our programmes, while they collect valuable content for Child.org. They're also taking over the Child.org Instagram for two weeks! Follow their posts at instagram.com/childdotorg and see all thier blogs here.

We’ve landed! On Sunday for Rona, and early Monday morning for Amelia we arrived in Nairobi to start our placement in Content and Communications with the Kenyan Child.org team. We’ll be gathering communications material for the Baby Box programme and the upcoming Team Mum campaign. Given that we’re staying in a flat about three minutes from the office you’d think it would be quite a smooth commute on Monday morning - you’d be wrong. We ended up going to the wrong office building and turning up late for our first day, just getting into the culture of ‘Kenyan Time’.
 

We met the lovely Marti, Doreen and Faith, who briefed us on our plan for the next two weeks and explained more about Child.org’s programming work in Nairobi, and Kenya more broadly. Our time here will be spent in a combination of visiting clinics where the baby boxes are handed out and postnatal checks take place, and going out into communities with Doreen and Faith while they conduct follow-up surveys.  

Part of our first afternoon was also spent sourcing Kenyan sim cards so we can stay in touch on the go, and exploring the local supermarket. We returned to our flat with a selection of Kenyan delicacies to try, including maize flour to make ugali, a traditional Kenyan carbohydrate based dish that goes with stew or curry.  With the help of our bemused airbnb host, Jane, we assembled our first Kenyan dish and enjoyed it while watching the August Charity Fast-Track webinar (what else?).

Today was a public holiday so we had the chance to explore Nairobi and get to know a bit more about the city and its culture. Evans, who drives all the Nairobi Child.org staff around, was our tour guide for the day. We visited the top attractions in Nairobi, which include the giraffe centre and the baby elephant orphanage! It was amazing to get so up close and personal with our new friend Stacey the giraffe and 18 baby elephants. Whilst driving to our next location, the Kitengela glass centre, we stumbled upon a herd of zebras on the side of the road (when we say road, more of a dirt track). At the glass centre we crossed a thin wire bridge across a large ravine, something we’d talked to Marti about but she’d been too nervous to do herself!

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Now we’ve had the chance to acclimatise a bit, we are really excited to get stuck in and start gathering content from the woman at the clinic tomorrow. We’ll talk to them about their stories and experience with the baby boxes and collect quotes for our Team Mum appeal.

Amelia and Rona are on a Charity Fast-Track placement in Nairobi with the Child.org programming team. They will learn about how our comms team collects and uses stories and other content from our programmes, while they collect valuable content for Child.org. They're also taking over the Child.org Instagram for two weeks! Follow their posts at instagram.com/childdotorg and see all thier blogs here.

Thanks to your generous donations to our first ever Christmas campaign (£4884 raised so far!), we're kicking off the work to launch this brand new Child.org programme.

Charity Apprentice Alumnus Anne-Liese has joined the Child.org team to work one day a week on the programme planning and she has put together an initial plan proposal. This is still likely to be subject to further iterations and changes - but we wanted to share with you the basic plan so far!

The aim of this pilot is to find out just how effective the baby box is for mothers living in informal settlements ("slums") in Nairobi. We know that encouraging mums to attend antenatal sessions will have an impact on a baby's health, there's plenty of evidence for that already! So the Child.org team have been deciding on what to measure during this pilot - as handing out 500 boxes is a great opportunity to get some really useful data.

Between February and July we'll be giving out the boxes, and measuring health outcomes of the babies. We'll be monitoring three groups of young mums:

• Group 1: A control group of mums who have not been given a box
• Group 2: Mums who are provided with a box
• Group 3: Mums who are provided with a box and attend an extra educational session

Each group will be monitored for three months with surveys. We'll also be collaborating with a student from Bristol university who is conducting her own additional research on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and the impact the box can have on babies in informal settlements.

The questions we want to answer as a result of the pilot include:

• Are the mums using the box as intended, for their baby to sleep in?
• If they are - is that having the desired impact upon the health of the baby?
• What added impact does an educational session have on the health of the baby?

We expect to gain a fantastic amount of research and data from this pilot, and very much look forward to sharing the results! When you consider how useful that information will be, to Child.org and other organisations too, it's clear that the long-term impact your donations will have is going to be pretty impressive.

(The photo on this blog was taken at one of the workshops we ran last month in Nairobi, where we consulted with many young mums on the design and contents of the box.)

We still need more donations to reach our target and fund this important new programme. Please consider donating to fund this pilot.

If you donate before the end of January, every penny you give will be matched by our friend Dr Mike Marks and the The Bush Hospital Foundation. So when you pay for one box, we can actually buy two!

Read more about our baby box programme.

Read about our plans for HealthStart in 2018.

Read about our plans for the Meru Women's Garden Project in 2018.

When someone asks me what my job is, I answer by telling them where I work. 

"What do you do?"

"I work for a charity."

Because that's what you do if someone asks you what your job is and it's a job they won't understand or the place you work is the most interesting bit. "I work for a bank" "I work at The London Eye".

But, in our sector, there's a problem with that. People don't realise that you're telling them where you work instead of what you do. Everyone thinks "charity" is a job. 

It's that time of year when Ruth, Anjali, Lucy and I travel to university careers fairs to tell students "how to get a charity job".  We sit on panels, we give talks, we man charity career stalls. We answer questions from inspiring young people who don't know what they are good at yet but they know they want to be a force for good in the world.

And I keep telling them: charities will not want to hire you because you care about children or animals or whatever their cause is. A charity will want to hire you for an event management job because you're good at running events. We'll want to hire you as a designer because you're good at designing stuff, a community fundraisier because you're great at motivating people in your community, and a programming officer because you make evidence-led decisions and are really really good at using spreadsheets.

If you care about our cause, that's a plus. But lots of people care about childhood inequality, and it doesn't mean they know how to write a decent email.

This is a problem for those people who don't know what they want to do but they want to make the world better. Because they don't understand which jobs to apply for, what the charity job titles mean.  They don't know what skills they need, they are working in the dark. They are researching, networking, accumulating experience for some mythical generic "charity job" that doesn't really exist. 

Meanwhile there are those graduates who are extremely skilled at exactly the stuff charities need. Event organisers, communicaters, finance wizards, project managers, sales people, marketeers etc. So many useful people don't even consider looking into "charity work" because they perceive "charity" as a single career for saintly people with above-average empathy. They walk right past the Charity Apprentice stall. 

Last week, at The University of Kent, my old uni, I requested to speak to students studying event management about why they should apply for charity roles. I wrote a hour long talk about why working in events in the charity sector is better than working in events anywhere else. Not a single budding event manager turned up to the talk. Instead, the room was full of people who want to "work in charity" and had no specific interest in events 

On 21st November I'm heading to Bristol for their Careers Beyond Profit fair I'm on a panel with other great people who work in the charity sector. I really enjoy this fair, last year it was very well run and extremely useful. But if I'm really honest, I think I should be on a panel with people who work in marketing and comms speaking to people who want to work in marketing and comms. I work in marketing and comms.

If universities would like to help their students find great careers that are suited to their skills, I believe they should invite a charity professional to EVERY careers panel, to talk about their finance careers, marketing careers, project management careers or event careers. (We have a challenge in the Child.org office: try to think of a career that you can't do in the charity sector. So far the only one we can think of is arms dealer.)

I'm looking forward to speaking in Bristol, and I loved visiting Kent, because the young people who want to work in the charity sector are brilliant, inspiring people who need advice on how to be useful to the world. They just need to work out what their skills and interests are, and then offer them to the charity sector. They can use those skills to create the change they want to see in the world. Our Charity Apprentice course helps them to do exactly that.

But I also want to reach out to those people who don't know they should be working in charity yet. I was one of those people when I graduated - I was good at writing and communicating so I went after a career in publishing. I then spent several years working very successfully on websites for air conditioning professionals and DIY retailers. I couldn't believe it when I discovered, age 27, that I could do my job for a charity. I could be writing stuff in a sector where the work's much more interesting, the pay is good, and all the money made by the organisation as a result of my work goes to cure cancer or help children living in poverty. Why didn't anyone tell me that when I was 21?

That's why I joined Child.org two years ago, to launch Charity Apprentice. Charity Apprentice is a training course that plugs the gaps for everyone.

• It shows the people who want to make a difference the most effective way that they personally can do that
• It gives the people who want to do a specific job in the sector that all-important professional charity experience
• It champions and explains the specific, difficult charity skills and knowledge that you only have if you work in the sector
• It enables anyone to qualify for their first job in the sector - without having to work full time for free

Unless you want to be an arms dealer, you can do your job in the charity sector and it will be better than doing it elsewhere. So I'm going to stop telling people I "work in charity" and start telling people "I work in marketing and comms for a charity". 

If you want a great job, apply for Charity Apprentice. It really is as simple as that!

The first ever Bootcamp weekend in London was designed to help apprentices to: 

• Forge connections and friendships with Child.org staff and with each other
• Gain an understanding of what it means to think and act like a professional fundraiser
• Gain an insight into some current key talking points in charity and international development
• Develop the skills and confidence to go out and approach people and sell an idea
• Know what Child.org do, and how we talk about ourselves
• Feel confident about what lies ahead in the course and in their work placements abroad
• Have a fully developed, completely awesome, challenge campaign idea ready to launch on theworld
• Learn about some exciting areas of charity work that you might never have heard about before.

We were thrilled that after the event the apprentices who attended agreed unanimously that we had met these aims. All apprentices also voted that the weekend had been both interesting and fun.

What the apprentices said

"I honestly couldn't name anything that I would want differently, I enjoyed it all so much."

"It was informative, fun and social, and we are all extremely grateful for your hard work to put on this event! Thank you so much."

"You've helped us build some valuable connections and introduced us to things we would never have otherwise known about. I couldn't believe the standard of the guest speakers; some really big charity names that were really impressive people to have a chance to meet. I really feel like I know so much more about the sector from all the speakers and from speaking to the staff at child.org over the weekend."

"It has been great to meet so many fantastic and inspirational team mates and speakers who have like minded career aspirations and I'm sure this network will grow over time."

The programme

If you're wondering what happens at Charity Apprentice bootcamp, take a look at the programme:

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Even after a packed day of speakers and workshops, the apprentices were raring to go on their Saturday night out, where they were set fun challenges to complete with their teams! Check out how they did on Instagram, hashtag #chappbootcamp2016.

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What our speakers said

Child.org were very proud to have such amazing apprentices to represent Child.org this weekend. Just look at the tweets from our speakers: 

Wow. The @Childdotorg apprentices are infinitely more passionate and driven than I could've imagined. The future's looking bright!

— David Lacey (@TheIGManager) February 13, 2016

Thanks for having me guys! It was an absolute pleasure. What a great group involved in this year's @ChApprentice! https://t.co/lgYMMnEdeO

— Rachael Cox (@rachaelcatriona) February 14, 2016

Great time talking vol mgt with @ChApprentice 2016 cohort - future of the #NFP sector is in good hands!

— Ruth Taylor (@Ruth_STaylor) February 14, 2016

Exciting to speak to the Charity apprentices about innovation today, hope they found it useful @mrsjelly and @thomasmuirhead

— Modhabobo (@Modhabobo) February 13, 2016

An enormous thank you to all the amazing speakers and volunteers who gave up their time to inspire our Charity Apprentices this weekend. 

Whether you’re one of our Charity Apprentices, or a long time supporter by direct debit; one of our fantastic Ambassadors or a 9 year old climbing Ben Nevis, we feel you deserve the best support you can get. So we’re committed to providing you with the support you deserve by building our team.

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Content & Community Manager
Ellie Dawes has joined the KOP team as our new Content and Community Manager. Ellie will be focused on making our Charity Apprentice course the best training experience for the third sector anywhere in the world. She will ensure our Apprentices emerge with all the skills they need to change the world. She’ll also be responsible for how KOP talks – being an expert copy writer and brilliant at bringing a brand to life. Ellie has written a blog on Charity Apprentice.

Supporter Experience Assistant
Anjali (above) has joined us as our new Supporter Experience Assistant. She’ll be focused on supporting the entire KOP community (Apprentices, Ambassadors, Supporters, Alumni). It’s essential you all get everything you need, and know that you have someone you can chat to if you need anything. She’s lovely, so give her a call on 07751768207 if you have any questions.