If you’ve seen our Annual Report then you’ll know how busy we have all been, and that has carried on over the past three months. Our trainers in Uganda have run a big PTSD Awareness course in Lira, and a CATT course for International Rescue Committee (IRC) staff in Arua. In the Yemen, where the plight of its ‘haunted’ children has recently been highlighted by reports from Jeremy Bowen, we’ve run online training for 30 people . This work was made possible by Kawkab Alwadei of Bridges to Peace and Solidarity, and funded by IMET2000 and the British Yemeni Society. The trainees learned effective ways to help these children using our anxiety and resilience programme. We’ve recently completed an audit of the impact of this programme amongst Syrian refugee children, which you can read here, and in November this article was published in Open Democracy which shows how the techniques we teach have been used to help children affected by last year’s war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The past three months have also seen the growth of the Gaza clinic where the two existing staff have become trainers, and have already trained three new CATT practitioners.  And in Uganda we have another five new trainers - so congratulations to them all, and welcome to the family of ACT International!

We are also excited to have finally booked flights for long- delayed CATT training trips to Colombia and the Gambia.  Both will happen next February 2022, pandemic permitting.  We have excellent partner organisations (Children Change Colombia and WAYAS) in both countries and are really looking forward to meeting the trainees they are selecting for us. Both countries are facing really big challenges right now.

Of course none of this would have been possible without some magnificent recent fundraising efforts on the part of our supporters, most notably Michael Coates and Nathan Jones who spent a ‘brutal’ day swimming in the River Thames on 16th October They not only set a new world record for swimming 26.2 miles, but also raised nearly £3k for us. You can read more about their swim here. Don’t know how to thank you two enough!? 

Oh, and we’ve now managed the switchover to CAF Donate following the closure of Virgin Money Giving in November…sorry our Donate page still doesn’t look quite right…but it works so please use it! 

Enjoy the festive season and we wish everyone a happy, healthy and busy 2022!