One Death Every 30 Seconds

By David Shanklin, Senior Program Health Specialist

About 1 million children under the age of 5 die each year from a disease that is entirely preventable. An African child dies every 30 seconds from this same disease; nearly a half billion people become ill because of this disease.

What is this disease? Malaria. The cause? The parasitic disease is transmitted to people through infected mosquitoes.

About 40 percent of the world’s population is at risk of malaria, with the most serious area of impact being sub-Saharan Africa. About 90 percent of deaths due to malaria occur in Africa, mostly among young children.

Education is the foundation for prevention, but many vulnerable families do not know how malaria is transmitted or how to prevent or treat it. With World Malaria Day approaching April 25, it’s staggering to know that less than 25 percent of people who need prevention and treatment services actually receive them.

In countries where CCF works and there is a problem with malaria, our staff works with public health services to mobilize families to use insecticide-treated mosquito nets to sleep under, seek prompt treatment of suspicious cases, encourage pregnant women to take anti-malarial medicines and encourage indoor spraying for mosquitoes.

CCF also works with public health officials to ensure that services are available and that there are trained community health workers nearby with medicines to address the problem. While the process can be slow at times, there are signs of great progress in recent years.

For example, in Zambia from 2002 to 2007, two-thirds of all households in that country have benefitted from indoor spraying, about 70 percent of children under the age of 5 sleep under bed nets and more than 66 percent of pregnant women receive one or more doses to prevent the disease.

As World Malaria Day approaches, what can you do to help? Through CCF, mosquito bed nets and other medicines can be purchased on our Web site through our Gifts of Love & Hope catalog at www.christianchildrensfund.org/gifts. One mosquito bed net can protect a family for up to four years.

Remember, this disease is preventable. A child does not have to die every 30 seconds from malaria.

For more on malaria, click here to view a video of David Shanklin discussing the disease.

CCF Receives Coveted Four Star Rating

Charity Navigator, America’s premier charity evaluator, recently awarded Christian Children’s Fund its coveted four-star rating for its ability to efficiently manage and grow its finances.

According to Charity Navigator only one-fourth of the charities it reviews receive its highest rating of four stars. In receiving this rating CCF has proven that it executes its mission in a fiscally responsible way.

The unprecedented growth of the non-profit sector is a clear indicator that organizations like CCF must prove they operate under the highest of standards from both a management and fiscal standpoint.

Accountability and transparency are also core indicators to donors and sponsors in determining what non-profit organizations they want to support with their hard earned dollars.

For more information, click here.

Give a Chick, Help Children and Families for Years

By David Hylton, Public Relations Specialist

For the price of a few bags of Easter candy, you can change the life of a child in a developing country.

$9 buys a live baby chick for a family in The Gambia. That chick provides eggs to feed the family and the extra eggs are a source of income. For $10, you can purchase a duck for a family in Timor-Leste.

When children grow up in a family that is economically secure they are able to eat nutritious meals that help them grow. They can attend school and develop life skills.

You can buy chicks and ducks and many other animals through Christian Children’s Fund’s Gifts of Love & Hope catalog. The gifts are delivered straight to families in need in the areas we work. Dozens of other items are available, including $6 cough medicine for a child in Honduras and a $5,357 motorcycle for medical emergencies in Bolivia.

When buying a gift, you can select the items in honor of your friends and family. When you do that, we’ll send them personalized gift cards to let them know of your thoughtfulness. It may be a perfect conversation starter for you and your family this weekend.

To purchase a gift from the Gifts of Love & Hope catalog, visit www.christianchildrensfund.org and click on “Gifts of Love & Hope.”

Walk Across the World With Us

By David Hylton, Public Relations Specialist

In many countries around the world, children have to walk miles and miles each day to go to school or to find clean drinking water for their household or to receive adequate health care. They’re not walking for their health – they’re walking because they have no other choice.

At Christian Children’s Fund’s headquarters in Richmond, we often take walking for granted. We ride the elevator down a couple of floors for a meeting instead of taking the steps; we park at the closest spot possible at the office or at the mall; we go home, sit on the couch and watch TV throughout the evening. Well, enough is enough.

Beginning today, we are launching a program called Walk Across the World in which we are walking to several countries where we work. We aren’t literally going out the door and walking there, but we are using pedometers to track the numbers of steps we take each day.

The Walk Across the World initiative involves about a dozen teams with five people each. Walking across the world will be an overall CCF effort, with some friendly competition along the way. Every 2,000 steps will be counted as a mile.

While this is an effort of our newly formed Wellness Committee – Power Up – we also are doing this to stop and visit our program areas around the globe. The first stop is Mexico, which is 1,808 miles from Richmond (according to most crows). How fast will we get there? Check back with us often to find out and to learn more about our work there.

In addition to following our progress here, you can keep tabs on us on Twitter at twitter.com/C_C_F where we will tag our walking entries with #WorldWalk. Please join us!

Ready to Pound the Monument Avenue Pavement

By David Hylton, Public Relations Specialist

We’re ready! Christian Children’s Fund’s 10k team gathered together today for a pasta lunch in preparation for Saturday’s Monument Avenue 10k. We’re all looking forward to representing CCF tomorrow! About two dozen staff members, plus more than a dozen family members, will be taking part in the 10k.

As I have mentioned before, when you see us out there in our CCF T-shirts, don’t think of us as individuals – think of what CCF does for the rest of the world, helping more than 15 million children and family members in 31 countries. We’re all helping deprived, excluded and vulnerable children have the capacity to become young adults, parents and leaders of the next generation who bring lasting and positive change in their communities.

Take the CCF World Water Day Challenge

In the world today, approximately 1.3 billion people (18 percent of the world’s population) lack access to safe drinking water. Others don’t have enough water to bathe or even wash their hands.

And every day, almost 10,000 children under the age of five die as a result of water-related illnesses.

Every day, an American family uses an average of 80 gallons of water. To put that number in perspective, one load of laundry uses almost 35 gallons of water.

In Africa, the average family only uses 5 gallons of water a day. That one load of laundry cycled by the American family is more than that same family in Africa consumes in one week.

CCF recognizes that clean, safe water is essential to the health and development of children, and to every family’s ability to be self-sustaining.

A few of our programs include:

• Water wells in Zambia, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Sri Lanka and Angola
• Latrines for schools in Sri Lanka
• Crop irrigation systems in India
• Water reservoirs in Brazil and Ecuador
• Training and education on water sanitation and hygiene in Honduras, India, Ecuador and the Philippines

But on March 22, in honor of World Water Day 2009, we at CCF want to see how well you can complete our World Water Day Challenge. That means for one day, Sunday, March 22, we’re asking you to reduce your water usage from the average 80 gallons to only 5 gallons for the entire day.

To help you along, here are a few statistics on water usage for every day tasks that most of us may take for granted.*

• Flush a Toilet: Between 1.5 and 3 gallons for each flush.
• Take a Shower: 3.5 gallons every minute.
• Use a Dishwasher: Between 6 and 11 gallons.
• Brush Your Teeth: 2 gallons.
• Cook a Quarter Pound of Hamburger: 1 gallon.
  
  *All statistics are according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Try it out and tell us how you did. What was the hardest challenge you faced in keeping your water usage to 5 gallons of water for one day? What have you learned in trying the CCF World Water Day Challenge?

Leave your comments below!

We’re all communicators

As a follow-up to our previous post on our Global Communications Workshop, we had one more participant offer her thoughts on the workshop … and this crazy Richmond weather.

Tenagne Mekonnen, Africa Region

Being from perfect climate in Ethiopia I am not used to extreme temperatures. So I was like a fish out of water when it snowed on my second day I was in the USA. I had the privilege of playing in the snow for the first time in my life!

As always, I enjoy working in CCF believing that I make a contribution to the children we serve in the organization. Communication helps us to belong to a society and benefit by such relationships. When our works and efforts are communicated very well with the quality, focus and detail, the happenings taking place in the organization will be cherished and create ownership.

Our communication focuses on healthy and secure infants, educated and confident children and skilled and involved youth. This will for sure indicate our direction and will enhance confidence of our stakeholders whose support has been consistent and life changing. The workshop strengthened my belief in how much communication will mean internally and externally.

The workshop through the week helped to learn, share and suggest in how to streamline the common mission and vision at all levels of the organization. We are all communicators! What shall we do then? Let us share what we have so that voices of our children and youth will be expressed.

Focusing on increasing the quality of programs, we then will educate and inform how we can bring change on deprived, excluded and vulnerable children. The workshop highlighted how as an organization we can share our self to the right persons at the right time and through the right channels to stakeholders, staff, communities and children.

Not only did the USA receive me in snow, but it also is sending me back home with rain and chilly weather!

For more information on where CCF works, click here.