By Ajer Qureshi | Program Manager
Over the past month, HERS has undergone a significant evolution, which saw new successes in outreach towards minority women in our area as well as solve a significant problem when it came to scheduling with our current members.
Majority of the women that attend HERS are Congolese refugee women, and many of them have children of their own, ranging from newborns to teenagers. For these women, they often struggle to find people to care for their children while they have an errand to run, due to a variety of factors. For starters, the husbands are usually working odd hours to provide for the families and there is a general lack of knowledge and trust towards babysitting or daycare services that these women can take their children to, and that is if they can even afford said service. As such, many women were unable to attend previous HERS group meetings due to needing to take of their children.
For our latest meeting, we offered a compromise...we decided to host our seperate Youth Creative Mental Health Workshop at the same time as our HERS Group, with the intention being to allow the children to engage in fun creative activities in a seperate room while their mothers would attend the HERS Group next door.
This strategy proved fruitful for HERS Group, as our turnout increased at a higher rate compared to our previous HERS Group meetings. We had in attendance roughly 20 families during this meeting. We also were able to accomplish our secondary objective of providing mental health support for youths and creative activities for them to relieve any stress they may have.
Of course, through this experimental meeting, we learned some helpful lessons to consider for future meetings. In particular, we found that putting a bunch of kids in different age groups all in one room created a perfect storm of chaos and uncertainty, so for future meetings efforts will need to be made to seperate some of the age groups to a seperate additional room to do a seperate creative workshop.
On top of that, we had an issue with the distribution of diapers towards our mothers, many who were in need for diapers of a particular size...one in which we ran out of in a quick matter. This reminds us of how we need to ensure we are stocked up on enough diaper supplies of important supplies.
With these lessons in mind, we hope to continue to polish up HERS to grow as a sustainable source of support for black refugee mothers, in regards to their emotional support, their diaper resources, and now the care for their children during HERS group meetings.
Links:
By Ajer Qureshi | Program Manager
By Dimeji Tomori | CEO
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
