Spring has Sprung!
Over the past two months we have been celebrating children and young people (C&YP) with caring responsibilities and those from Armed Forces Families as we marked Young Carers Action Day along with Month of the Military Child. With that in mind, we’d love to draw your attention to The Children’s Society’s The Nexus Project.
Nexus is a three-year project funded by the Armed Forces Covenant Trust. The project aims to improve support, resources and access to services for young carers within Armed Forces Families.
Caring at a young age can impact a child’s wellbeing, health, education, and free time. These issues are exacerbated for young carers within Armed Forces Families due to parent deployments, frequent house moves and living in secure military housing.
Nexus aims to work with professionals from Armed Forces support services, young carers services, schools, the NHS and others to drive change by:
- empowering young people to explore their lived experiences
- building specialist service networks
- advising on systems change
- campaigning alongside young carers
- equipping and training professionals.
They can also help young carers understand their rights, introduce them to other young carers and advise on different ways into education and employment. For more information please click here
MotMC:
We have celebrated the Month of the Military Child in a variety of ways, including working in partnership with Aggies and Pompey Military Kids to secure a community planter space in the recently revamped gardens of Victoria Park, Portsmouth. With the help of award winning garden designer and mental health advocate, Leigh Johnstone aka The @beardygardener the children and young people (C&YP) worked hard to design and ‘plant up’ the space. This will be an ongoing project, with the C&YP regularly updating the space with seasonal decorations and maintaining the plants.
We were delighted to fund Never Such Innocence to deliver school workshops across the UK that encouraged and amplified the voices of Service children. Never Such Innocence have a team of creative practitioners who visited schools in Wales, Preston, Scotland and the Southwest to hold workshops in poetry, art, speech and songwriting. The workshops provided young people with the creative tools to express their feelings and produce powerful pieces of work around the theme of conflict and Service life.
The workshops were not just for military children, they were a great way for all children to learn about what military life looks like for their classmates and peers.
Bicentenary:
We would like to say a massive thank you to Andy Jackson MBE and his partner Helen who very generously turned Andy’s 80th birthday party into a fundraising event for The Naval Children’s Charity. Held at The Ex-Serviceman’s Club in Havant, Andy and Helen raised an amazing amount for us, and we are so incredibly grateful. Thank you both so very much, you are officially inducted into our NCC200 Bicentenary ‘Wall of Fame’.
As part of our bicentenary celebrations, we are delighted to present our brand new range of limited edition ‘NCC 200’ merchandise. If you would like to have a look at our fantastic array you can see all the options available here.
Resources:
We pride ourselves on the wide range and selection of resources we offer our Naval children, from our ‘Doing Distance’ online worksheets, to our ‘Time Penguin’ and ‘Time Rabbit’ books with their knitted companions.
We are about to launch our new range of Wellbeing Packs, in partnership with The Naval Families Federation as a follow on to our Books for All offer. Keep your eyes on our social media channels for the launch of the new and improved offer!
Work Experience Opportunities:
Whatever your young person is considering for the future, work experience is always a valuable addition to any CV!
However, we know work experience can be hard to come by, or fit around existing studies, which is why we’ve teamed up with Springpod to offer young people aged 13+ a whole host of free, online work experience opportunities. The platform also hosts lots of helpful videos about apprenticeships, T-levels and other qualification routes.
Young people can register for FREE by heading to Sign Up | Springpod
Please input The Naval Children’s Charity as the School/College when registering.