Raising Futures Kenya COVID-19 Response
At this time of great concern for us all, we sincerely hope that you and your loved ones are in good health.
It is an anxious time for all of us at Raising Futures Kenya – both personally and in terms of how we respond as an organisation. We are following the World Health Organisation and UK and Kenyan Government guidance and have put strict measures in place to protect the children, young people and families we work with and to ensure our staff are safe.
We are lucky that most of our UK team working is done remotely already with our team stretching from Sheffield to Switzerland via Brighton and London. We are very well set up for remote working so this has meant we have been able to continue with business as usual with much of our UK based work and in how we keep in touch with our Kenyan colleagues. Our UK Director Vic is pregnant so is taking additional precautions around social distancing – particularly tricky with a three year old in the house! Our Deputy UK Director Kirsty was due to visit Kenya at the end of March, this has obviously now been postponed.
As many small charities and businesses, we have concerns around funding for the year ahead and have spent time reassessing our projected income and looking at ways to cut back on expenditure to ensure we remain financially stable and able to maintain our core programming should the worst happen. We will review this regularly in coming weeks and months but only time will tell – we’re hopeful that our dedicated community of supporters and the wider global community will pull together at this time of crisis. We’re already seeing some heart-warming displays of humanity in response to this crisis. This brings us to the point where we need to ask for your help…
The children and communities we support in Kenya are at risk and we urgently need your help.
With all disasters, the vulnerable, like Margaret and her two sons Emmanuel and Peter pictured above, are always most at risk . Rural communities and informal urban settlements like the ones we work in are not equipped to deal with this pandemic – they are cut off from sources of information and organised support systems. Without immediate interventions such as sharing of public health information and emergency supplies, these vulnerable children, their families and communities are in danger.
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has meant our vocational training centres and specialist schools we support in Kenya have closed. Schools can no longer be the vehicle for sharing public health information, without access to televisions, radios or the internet these vulnerable communities will miss out on life-saving information. What’s more, for many children and young people the lunch they got at school was the only meal they’d eat all day.
They need us more than ever and we need your help to:
- Provide life-saving public health information to the most vulnerable communities.
- Provide essential items like food, soap, sanitary products, medicine etc to ensure the communities we work with are safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Adapt our counselling and mental health support to deliver it via the phone to ensure that no child or young person feels alone during this crisis.
We really need your help. We know this is a scary time for all of us but the way people and communities are pulling together has given us cause for hope. Would you join in supporting our vulnerable communities through this incredibly difficult period by giving £10 today, or whatever you can afford?
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