Support for 200 vulnerable children and mothers

Dear friend,

Firstly, I want to thank you. For supporting our work and believing that vulnerable children are worth empowerment.

Our work this year is more and more focusing on supporting vulnerable mothers (target 30) and their children ( up to 100) in the Central Portugal region. We are more and more convinced that mothers are the engine behind a balanced, sustainable and compassionate future as they are the primary caretakers and source of values for their children. Healthy, happy and balanced mothers will raise healhy, happy and balanced children.

But many mothers are simply overwhelmed, stressed and exhausted. And some mothers are vulnerable due to past abuse, rape or trauma affecting their every day life. These vulnerable mothers are oftern socially excluded and stigmatised by society and their chidren are facing the same issues. We at Romi's Way want to empower these mothers and their children to find their power and healing.

This autumn we have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with five local and global Non-Profit Organisations working with victims of human trafficking, women rights and gender based violence in order to centrallised our support to mothers and children in most need. We are in process of training volunteer mentors to work with these famileis, as well as preparing activites in the region that will allow the mothers and children to receive psychosocial support, stress reduction activiteis and equine assisted therapy sessions. 

Please continue following up our project journey, and if possible, consider supportign us in the future too. 

We wish you a wonderful autumn,

Best regards,
Sari Bernardo & Romi's Way team

Greetings from Portugal!

Fixed plans can be a cause of stress and headache - and they do not work in a world that is subject to continuous change. We are Romi's Way have taken the time to review and adapt out project plans needs to address those within our target groups who need it most, and who are victims or struggling survivors of imbalance.

This process required adapting to COVID pandemic rules and new needs that isolation, loss of income and socialising opportunities have caused to children and their caretakers. Mother2Mother project was born from this need, targeting 250 children and 150 vulnerable mothers in Portugal who are struggling to support the needs and development of their children and who are facing stigma and prejudice from the society. Children are the leaders of the future, and mothers are the power-engine ensuring they have the attitudes, skills and values that it takes to be a good decision maker for the whole planet. Therefore mothers are not just important, but they are crucial for the future of humanity and the planet!

We have focused on proposal development and reaching out to grants & foundations to fund the start of this lovely and super important project fully or partially - with a small investment of around 50,000Euros per year we could indeed have a super impactful project and directly leverage 150 mothers and their 250+ children out from struggles and isolation. 

If we are successful with the project, our next report here is likely to share some development with this project. Fingers and toes crossed!!

Stay healthy, happy and hungry for opportunities to bend & adapt :)

Kindly,

Sari Bernardo
CEO - Romi's Way

Who would have thought last year this time, that the COVID situation would be having such a significnt effect on most of our lives a year later! Portugal, our home counry being one of the worse situations in 2021 has ensured our activities and efforts to get our hands into face-to-face activities continues to be in halt. 

But, as usual, we have (and will not!) stopped! We have actually prepared a 'COVID related' support project plan targeting struggling young mothers and their children in a way that engages them in two-way communication, sharing and receiving & giving donated itesm of needs. More impornatly, it allows peer support and mother-to-mother comfort to help our 'sisters' who have been affected financially due to COVID or even before the pandemic. 

Our aim as an organisation is to restore balance between humans, animals and enviroment and to remind us all on how that is mainstreamed to all our actions, is that we never seek to 'solve problems' caused by imbalance, but rather to act in a way that eliminates elements contributing to imbalance. For our support project to young mothers, poverty is the underlying imbalancing root cause and therefore our motivation is to leverage the young mothers out of poverty (not necessarily meaning lack of money kind of poverty, but also lack of self-respect, lack of empowerment and lack of joy are forms of poverty that we look into carefully). We look forward to updating you all on the developent of this project, which can be conducted with online and face-to-face modalities. So as usual, keep watching this space and maybe next report would provides some toe-ticklingly exhiting news.

Huge thanks for your continuous support and care!

Kind regards,
Sari Bernardo - CEO & Founding member of Romi's Way

It seems ages ago when we were planning to conduct project activities without COVID restrictions and like for so many organisation, our activities came to halt for months.

We are, however very glad to report that the following actions toke place in the past 3 months:

- in August our big donation of collected clothing and essential items for young mothers and low-income familes in Azores Island, affected by the last year hurricane in the area were all delivered by our local partner Caritas Portugal. Feedback was excellent and these items really came handy. Thank you all who donate funds and items for this small project.
- We also contracted a short term digital media support for few working days a month and a 10-day consultant to support us to connect with private sector actors to parner and support our efforts. For these we are hugely grateful for the small COVID assistance funds received directly from GlobalGiving.

As for other updates, we have developed a Romi's Way School concept and are under discussion for a pilot project in Portugal - land has been indentified to accommodate the project which requires a food-forest-playground land and area to accommodate mobile-classrooms. More about this if we get the funding through (fingers crossed everyone please!).

We are also developing a small cooperation with an internatioal food-forest orgnisation seeking ways to integrate greenareas as mandatory parts of educational spaces and school communities, as well as contributing to the need for childnre to learn about Nature, in Nature and with Nature - in otherwords, to connect the next generation back to the liivng environment.

A small concept promoting "Good Life for All' was created with a 1-minute mini video for social and digital media audience, and we have updated our website a little bit (ongoing process though).

Lastly, we are cooking a campaing to raise awarness for wellbeing issues of animals used in enterttainemt, sports and tourism industry by educating people on the natural needs of these species.

All these small efforts are contributing to our greater aim to bring balance between people (children), animals and the environment.

We are ever so grateful for all your support.

Links:

• 'Good Life for All' - mini video is displaced on the home page

As most individuals and organisations, Romi's Way has been affected by the COVID-19 and a lot of our planned activities have come to halt (temporarily). Although this time has been extremely frustrating and there may not be a lot to report since March 2020, we can report that we have not spend any project funds nor implemented any activities during this period. We are waiting to receive an update from our partner in Azores (Caritas Portugal), who due to COVID19 also had to postpone the distribution event of clothing and good collected by Romi's Way team to support the Hurricane 2020 affected school communities & families in the islands. We are hoping to receive the news on the item distributions in July. We know, now more than ever, vulnerable families are in need of support. 

Although not much results are shown in the past few months, we have managed to develop our work in other ways.

We have presented our Green Leadership Programme (of which this project is a part of) concept note to some potential partners from non-profit and private sectors whom we think would be a great match to support our vision to create a balanced world where children are taught to care for the environment, animals and for other humans through compassion, kindness and real understanding of Life. This is to educate the next generation with skills that the planet needs in future, shifting the focus from economic growth and 'me-centred' thinking towards ecological health and 'we-centred' thinking. Our CEO has held meetings (online) with a potential partner from a private sector who loves our vision and is interested supporting a first Green Leaders School to be established in Portugal. We aim for nothing less than an educational revolution :) in other words, we are hoping to inspire traditional educational systems to include changes in their ways of teaching and perhaps hoping to create more schools like our Green Leaders School. More news about this later on - for now, please keep your fingers and toes crossed for the partnership to be formed. 

Lastly, we are in discussion to form another partnership with a local non-profit organisation to work on the ethological aspect of this project, hoping to include the equine-assisted healing sessions into the programme. Again, due to the COVID situation, these plans are postponed until September.

We hope to continue our work and plans shortly and look forward to keep you posted with some good news.

With huge thanks for everyone supporting our work - every donation counts and is used 100% for our projects. We are a small organisation with a big vision, and your continuous support is helping us to create a balanced, healthy world the next generation.

Kindly,

Sari Bernardo - CEO, Romi's Way