Please Remember Us: iACT’s Little Ripples helping refugee families during the pandemic
Featured in Childhood Education International’s journal: Childhood Education: Innovations, the July/August 2020 issue on page 6.Children have a right to access information, “especially those aimed at the promotion of his or her social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and mental health.” Thus, as refugees (both children and adults) struggle to make sense of this pandemic with very few to no resources, iACT, an international nonprofit organization that provides humanitarian action to aid, empower, and extend hope to those affected by mass atrocities, is working with refugee leaders, other humanitarian organizations, and volunteers to provide the necessary resources to help refugee children and families stay safe and healthy. While the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated suspension of iACT’s innovative and cutting-edge early childhood education program Little Ripples (LR), iACT is nevertheless honoring LR’s core values of peace, helping, and sharing by working with refugee and displaced community leaders living in Chad, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Greece to mitigate the consequences of program closures. Together, they are preparing and distributing accessible learning-at-home resource sheets for families, as well as the larger refugee community.
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UPDATES
iACT 33 in Chad: The Work Continues
Toward the end of January, iACT’s program associate Julia and I traveled to Chad to connect with our teammates living in the Darfuri refugee camps located in the eastern part of the country. We were there for a couple weeks, and the camps we stopped in were Am Nabak, Touloum, Iridimi, Djabal, and Goz Amer. We refer to this trip as “iACT33” because members of the iACT family, starting with our founder Gabriel Stauring, have now gone to Chad 33 times. Gabriel’s first trip was in 2005, and Katie-Jay later joined him for several visits.
Supporting hope in the Central African Republic
By the afternoon, the consensus was encapsulated by what one humanitarian worker in Bangui told us, “This is CAR. It is always high risk.”
Promising Practices in Refugee Education: Invest in Teacher Training
Teachers are the most important school-based factor in determining the quality of education.