Keep a Child Warm: Where We're At Now
As Covid-19 has shifted our world in many ways, Keep a Child Warm has been altered to keep up with the changing landscape.
During the lockdowns, everything came to a standstill, forcing us to pause with Keep a Child Warm and review our approach. Our desire was to keep the program going, especially with the need being even greater than before. We decided to target our support and send clothes directly to children’s homes and social services. In 2020, we managed to send clothes to a children’s home in Romania, but this was incredibly expensive and took nearly a month to arrive. What has become even more apparent is that in many countries, those who were already struggling economically are now drowning due to the impact of Covid-19; there is more need of support for the children. Therefore, we are more determined to find and deliver targeted support.
Our Project Coordinator, Victor, worked with Social Services in Moldova to collate and send us lists of children in the fostering system, children’s homes, and the mother and baby unit. These lists enabled us to compile boxes of warm clothing specific to these children; however finding a way of sending them to Moldova was a challenge. Before being able to send out the boxes of clothing, we had a trial run with a single box of nappies and sanitary products for the mother and baby unit, delivering it through a courier service rather than lorry loads. The first run was successful, and so we were able to send 11 boxes of winter clothing and blankets for 48 children in foster care to Cahul, Moldova.
Moving forward, we are continuing to figure out how to adapt Keep a Child Warm with the global obstacles we now face. We have stayed in contact with our connections in Moldova, collaborating ideas on how to provide warmth to vulnerable children, such as buying fuel for the families to heat their homes. We’re also exploring different ways to have large-scale clothing distributions; possibly working more closely with local partners and their teams so that distributions don’t rely solely on UK-based teams, and they can operate internally.
We are continuing with Keep a Child Warm Moldova on a smaller scale but using a more targeted approach, hopeful to be able to ramp up production. Our capacity to run the project and the cost of sending shipments out are the major factors playing into our ability to increase the amount of winter clothing and blankets we are able to send out. With the effects Covid-19 has had, the world is in a greater state of need. Amidst these changes, we are continuing to help the children that desperately need the warmth and support that Keep a Child Warm provides.