Welcome to CENFACS’ Online Diary!
26 June 2020
Post No. 149
The Week’s Contents
• Summer of Happiness – In Focus: Healthiness
• Thanksgiving Days: Supporters’ Days
• Distress-free Life from Coronavirus for Children, Young People and Families in Africa
… and much more!
Key Messages
~ Summer of Happiness – In Focus: Healthiness
CENFACS’ Summer of Happiness will focus on Healthiness, on healthy life expectancy as predicator of life evaluation. We have chosen to focus on Healthiness because of the prolong impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
Under the Main Development section of this post, we have given a preview of projects and programme that will make our Summer of Healthiness.
~ Thanksgiving Days: Supporters’ Days
From 29 to 30 June 2020, we are thanking all our supporters (current and past ones).
We would like to take the opportunity of the end of June to thank them (and you if you are one of them) for helping CENFACS IN ENHANCING AND SUSTAINING FREEDOMS AND CAPABILITIES BY WORKING IN ALLIANCE WITH LOCAL PEOPLE TO DEVELOP SUSTAINABLE INITIATIVES.
What do mean by Thanking Days or Supporters’ Days?
These are Special Days of Thank You we would like to dedicate to all those who contributed to our work for any types of support they have given us over this financial year. This dedication is normally held in the last week of and by the end of June. For this year, Thank-you Days will be held on 29 and 30 June 2020.
As we are in CENFACS’ Month of Creation and Mission Year, we shall find all sorts of creative, innovative and communicative ways of thanking our invaluable supporters and backers. These thanking ways may include the following:
√ Conversing with our supporters over phones
√ Signing and sending thank-you prints or e-cards to them
√ Telling them the stories or outcomes about the people and communities they helped through their support
√ E-mailing and tweeting them with messages of gratitude
√ Telling thank-you stories
√ Playing and listening with them music and songs of thank you
√ Making thank-you videos and films
√ Giving back to them by volunteering our time to the cause they deeply care about
√ Undertaking a free translation service (French to English and vice versa)
√ Reading African poems and poetry
√ Sending to them digital and technologically animated thank-you messages
√ Doing creative and design works symbolising thank you
√ Sending designed and hand crafted made objects and crafts of acknowledgement
√ Making video calls since the coronavirus pandemic and its associated impacts restrict every physical contact, etc.
If you are one of the CENFACS’ supporters, please we would like to let you know the Thanking Days at CENFACS are your Days. Do not hesitate to get in touch, if you do not mistakenly hear from us. We will welcome you; reconnect with you and thank you on the occasion for the helpful difference you made to our work and project beneficiaries.
Your invaluable support has meant a lot for our programme and project beneficiaries over this ending financial year.
We would like to express all our sincere gratitude to you for helping us to help reduce poverty.
For further details, contact CENFACS’ Thanksgiving-End-of-June-2020 Team.
~ Distress-free Life from Coronavirus for Children, Young People and Families in Africa
Distress-free Life from Coronavirus for Children, Young People and Families in Africa is one of Summer Appeal projects making the first part of our Summer Programme. This appeal has been already launched.
The appeal is about supporting children, young people and families (CYPFs) in places in Africa where healthcare systems are vulnerable and weak, and cannot cope with the mounting pressure and damaging effects of the Covid-19.
Supporting this appeal means helping CYPFs to minimise and mitigate the impacts of Covid-19 on them. Your support will help to reduce the risks stemming from the economic and health threats that have been caused by Covid-19. One can think of a child or young person without any dreams and expectations, what will be his/her future.
Yes!
You can help that child to dream and expect for a better life and future.
You can help stop Covid-19 to become a structural constraint and handicap for that child.
You can help stop Covid-19 to create lifelong impacts on children and young people.
You can help stop children’s and young people’s lives being reduced back below the poverty line.
You can stop the lost generation of Covid-19 to happen in Africa.
To make the above happen, support Distress-free Life from Coronavirus for Children, Young People and Families in Africa.
Details of this appeal and ways of supporting can be found at: cenfacs.org.uk/supporting-us/
Extra Messages
~ Arts & Design Project: Unknown and Unnamed Artists and Designers of Poverty Relief and Sustainable Development with the example of Young Creators and Innovators
Artists and designers play an active role in helping to reduce poverty and enhance sustainable development. So, this week we are working on some of the works carried out by artists and designers especially those from small scale and charitable backgrounds, the local arts and design products and services undertaken by local people and communities sometimes to make ends meet.
These kinds of work can include those carried out by poor families, children, young people and those who are left out of the economic growth or upturn. Additionally, there are as works carried out by unknown and unnamed artists and designers who may be amateurs or not professionals or not just celebrities.
All these small pieces of art and design works can help relieve poverty and enhance the process of sustainable development.
Example of Unknown and Unnamed Artists and Designers: Young Creators and Innovators
Some Young Creators and Innovators can be classified as unknown and unnamed artists and designers. They are of all sorts of talents and abilities who can create and innovate to reduce poverty and enhance sustainable development. Their works can help reduce Covid-19 induced poverty and hardships while keeping the progress of the realisation of sustainable development goals. They could be the finders of the today’s solutions for tomorrow’s problems.
So, this week we are continuing our Arts and Design project by looking at the contribution that unknown and unnamed artists and designers, and amongst them are Young Creators and Innovators, are making in reducing poverty and hardships as well as in enhancing sustainable development.
~ Arts and Design Project: Skills in Art and Design
To carry on our Arts and Design project and Month of Creative Economic Development, we are as well dealing with the following three types of skills in art and design:
√ Skills for poverty relief
√ Skills for sustainable development
√ Skills in response to Covid-19 threats
The focus in this activity is on finding out ways of helping people to develop skills in arts and design to communicate their messages about poverty relief, sustainable development and responses to Covid-19 threats.
The interest in doing it is to explore ways of making Arts and Design Skills that poor people possess to use them in achieving tangible poverty-relieving and sustainable development outcomes, as well as in dealing with the economic and health threats posed by Covid-19.
Developing skills in arts and design can help to overcome poverty, enhance sustainable development and reduce the level of threats brought by the coronavirus pandemic.
# Arts and Design Skills related to poverty reduction, sustainable development and Covid-19 response
=> Art and design skills as a poverty fighter
Skills in art and design can be a rewarding way of fighting poverty and hardships by giving to the poor an artistic occupation or by buying their artistic makings to raise the funds they need to make ends meet, let alone helping them to make a career in the creative industry.
=> Art and design skills as an enhancer of sustainable development
Art and design skills can help to create and innovate products and services that do not pollute, deplete or destroy the nature, while meeting poor people’s needs and reducing carbon prints.
=> Art and design skills as a response to the life-threatening and destroying impacts posed by Covid-19
To respond to coronavirus and its damaging effects, it requires skills. In the context of our Campaign for Resilience against Covid-19, these skills could include those of saving lives, protecting healthcare infrastructures and reducing Covid-19 induced poverty and hardships.
These three types of skills could be handled on papers, digitally or physically with objects.
But, what are these art and design skills?
# General Art and Design Skills
=> Art or artistic skills consist of the following:
Drawing, composition, identifying colours, painting, dress making, dealing with shapes, digital art handling, and visual art management
=> Design skills can include:
Knowledge, observation, visualisation, experimentation, validation, communication, problem-solving and digital design, etc.
Also, as part of the Skills Data Bank run by CENFACS, one can registered their skills in art and design with the CENFACS Community.
For further details about Arts and Design for poverty relief, sustainable development and reduction of Covid-19 threats, please contact CENFACS.
Main Development
• Summer of Healthiness
At the beginning of Spring 2020, we argued that Spring 2020 was special because of the Covid-19 and its crippling issues. Covid-19 has pushed us to adapt our Spring of Life Renewal to that of Life Salvation. The same special feature of Spring 2020 has moved into Summer 2020. The same adaptation exercise is happening with our Summer of Happiness which will be of Healthiness.
Generally speaking, Summer is a season of Happiness within CENFACS. It is the season of happiness from most of our stakeholders after having a long busy period of working and educational activities like everybody. They look forward to a long period of break which often happens during Summer, in the months of July and August. Those of our stakeholders living in other parts of the world, this long waiting break can be in different months of the year. The important thing is there are at least nearly two months of break.
However, Covid-19 has disrupted this habit and threatening human habits of breaks or holidays. Because of Covid-19 disruptions and its continuing negative impacts, our Summer of Happiness will be centred on Healthiness.
As the specific medicine and vaccine to eradicate Covid-19 have not yet been discovered, Covid-19 is still around. This is despite the fact that its threat levels have been reduced in some places. We still have to live in a physical and social distancing environment while disinfecting our living environment from the Covid-19 strains and maintaining special hygiene and cleanliness. This is happening let alone the human and economic fatalities that Covid-19 is causing and a considerable amount of non-essential human and economic activities that it has taken in hostage.
Because of the above, it makes sense to call our Summer 2020 a Healthiness one to reflect the predominance that health has in the last three months and will have during this Summer in our living memory, life and work. Summer of Healthiness will focus on the physical, mental, social and economic health of our project beneficiaries and community as well as the Covid-19 ramifications in terms of less room for manoeuvre for poverty reduction and sustainable development, let alone the lack of spaces we have to share.
Additionally, at the beginning and during our Covid-19 Campaign we have argued that Covid-19 is both a health and economic threat. If this argument is solid, it will be premature to counterclaim that by saying this double threat has now completely disappeared given the devastating human and economic impacts and costs it has caused.
Because of this enduring character of Covid-19 in terms of economic and health threats it embodies, our Summer 2020 will be of Healthiness. Therefore, the projects and activities that we are preparing and have prepared for this Summer will reflect the theme of healthiness.
In fact, our Summer 2020 will still have happiness in it. When we define happiness, there is an element of health in it. To be happy is also to be healthy or to have healthy life expectancy. We shall expand more on this when we will present our Healthiness Projects; projects making the second part of our Summer Programme.
During this Summer 2020, we will deal with both the freedom from illness or pain, and the freedom from the lack of monetary or material possessions. Not being medical doctors or healthcare scientists, we will work in our capacity of specialists in poverty reduction and scientists in sustainable development together with local people in need to help them gain or regain their freedoms from illness and poverty while still assisting them to enhance areas of sustainable development within the context and under the constraint of Covid-19.
To do that, we have planned the following projects and programme for Summer 2020.
• Preview of Projects and Programme for Summer 2020
• • June 2020
# Campaign for Resilience against Covid-19 (or Covid-19 Campaign)
We are continuing to implement the phase 2 of this campaign; phase which is about Impact Monitoring and Evaluation.
Depending on the level of threats posed by Covid-19 during this Summer and the evolution of the epidemiological curves of Covid-19, we shall reassess our Covid-19 Campaign and make a judgement whether or not we shall move to phase 3; that is the phase of Post-Covid-19 Rehabilitation Strategy.
# Thanksgiving Days: 29 & 30 June 2020
This year’s Thanksgiving Days will be virtually run on 29 and 30 June 2020. Because of the coronavirus pandemic and its associated impacts and restrictions, we will not physically running Thanksgiving Days.
We have already released the contents of this year’s Thanksgiving Days; contents which are up within the Key Messages section of this post.
• • July 2020
# Financial Updates: Managing your nature accounts and Covid-19 accounts
The 2020 Edition of Financial Updates (a CENFACS’ Individual Capacity Building and Development resource for Summer) will focus on two sets of accounts: nature and Covid-19 accounts.
Nature accounts (or natural capital accounting) are those any household can run in their budget to keep their relationships with nature in harmony. One can integrate ecosystems and biodiversity into their household budgets. This can enable them to take responsibility towards nature or natural resources.
Covid-19 accounts are any items of household budgets related to the protection against the current wave of Covid-19.
Besides these two sets of accounts, the 2020 Financial Updates will update readers about the current financial and economic situation as economies are going into recession, due to the Covid-19 consequences. The updates will go further in terms of financial and economic advice to resist economic recession and its potential damaging effects.
# All-in-one Impact Assessment
July, which is the Analytics month within CENFACS, is the month to be at CENFACS for those who are working on project and programme impacts.
We will be doing two levels of impact assessment as follows:
(1) Our usual July Impact Monitoring, Evaluation, Review and Analytics for projects and programmes that we run in the preceding financial year
(2) Impact assessment of the Covid-19 Campaign, which is due to continue
# Virtual Summer Festival with Seven Days of Development in July
In focus for our Summer 2020 Festival will be: Health Economics – How to make health economics work for the poor and the neediest
Since our argument about the coronavirus is that it is an economic and health threat, we would like to further explore this argument through our Seven Days of Development in July (7DDJ). In particular, we shall look at how health economics as part of economics that deals with aspects of health can be used to better help the poor and vulnerable people, those in most need of societies.
• • July – August 2020
# Children, Young People and Families (CYPFs) Summer Programme (Part I): Appeal Projects
Summer humanitarian Appeal projects are a set of projects to help alleviate multi-dimensional poverty experienced by CYPFs during the Summertime. Last year, we launched one integrated appeal that brought under one roof these projects. This year, because of the Covid-19 and its associated impacts, we are going to launch selected appeals for of them with special emphasis on health.
One of the selected appeals will be about helping CYPFs to be free from distress caused by the coronavirus pandemic and any health poverty associated with coronavirus. The appeal – Distress-free Life from Coronavirus for CYPFs in Africa (DfLCA) – is also about helping poor CYPFs to boost their capability to be healthy from the coronavirus and other diseases as well as from economic threats created by the same coronavirus.
Another appeal project that will have a particular attention and that is needed during the current health and sanitation is the Iconic Young Carer for a Coronavirus-free Environment (iYCCfE).
The two projects fall under the scope of health (for DFLCA) and care (for iYCCfE).
# Children, Young People and Families (CYPFs) Summer Programme (Part II): Healthiness Projects
Healthiness projects are another set of Summer projects making the second part of our Summer Programme. The same healthiness theme will apply to the second part of our Summer 2020 programme. We shall release more details about Healthiness projects in due course.
# Summer 2020 Run, Play and Vote to Reduce Poverty
Because we are still under the rules and restrictions of lockdowns to protect ourselves and others, this year our Triple Value Initiatives (Run, Play and Vote) will be organised according to the state of progress in the fight against Covid-19.
Depending on the circumstances (related to Covid-19 and level of reopening economies), some of these activities may be held virtually.
Half-year actions and results about these activities will be sought from those who are using them.
We shall ask those who undertook triple-value initiatives as Covid-19 recreational activities during the lockdowns to report on their actions and results as well.
# Integration or Factorisation of Covid-19 Impacts into Le Dernier Carré
We will be working on the integration or factorisation of Covid-19 into our four step model of poverty relief; that is the Last Square of Poverty Relief (Le Dernier Carré).
# Summer Track, Trip and Trending
Track and Trip activities will be run depending on the progress on the protection against Covid-19 and the restrictions which will be in place at the time.
Regarding Trending activity, we are going to follow the direction of poverty reduction via “social” and “virtual world”. In other words, how both social and virtual world can help in reducing poverty and enhancing sustainable development.
For example, how social media, social networking, social skills, social responsibility, social sciences, social distancing rules, social services, etc. can help in reducing poverty and enhancing sustainable development.
The above is just an indicative plan of work for our Summer of Healthiness. Depending on the progress about the fight against Covid-19 and results achieved in the reopening economies, we may review our Summer work plan.
Help CENFACS keep the Poverty Relief work going in 2020.
We do our work on a very small budget and on a voluntary basis. Making a donation will show us you value our work and support CENFACS’ work, which is currently offered as a free service.
One could consider a recurring donation to CENFACS in the furture.
Donate to support CENFACS!
FOR ONLY £1, YOU CAN SUPPORT CENFACS AND CENFACS’ PROJECTS, JUST GO TO http://cenfacs.org.uk/supporting-us/
Thank you for visiting CENFACS website and reading this post.
Thank you as well to those who made or make comments about our weekly posts.
We look forward to receiving your regular visits and continuing support throughout 2020 and beyond.
With many thanks.
