Dani Van Weenen, from Save the Children talked to Warwick Rotarians

Save the Children is active in over 100 countries with a network of local actors and NGOs. The current priority is to save children in Gaza and Ukraine from those wars and fighting the global food crisis in East Africa, and Afghanistan. The Princess Royal is an active Patron of Save The Children and has been for over 50 years, in honour of this Save The Children launched the Patron’s Fund which is dedicated to raising flexible funds.

Dani’s role as Change Manager is to harness technology through large change transformation programmes to position the charity to meet challenges in the field and to access public support for their work.

A current key project is “localisation”, a process that progressively increases the leadership and authority of affected people, in determining how resources are used within their communities to address their priorities, where they look to scale down their direct program delivery and increase the level of authority, capacity, decision-making, funding, and accountability that is held by local actors in humanitarian responses. Examples are ensuring all children have the right to vaccination and training local people to manage a “cold chain” getting vaccines to remote areas where children need protection from disease.

Rotarians were interested to hear how this supplemented the Rotary mission to eradicate Polio, which has brought cases of this paralysing disease down from 350,000 cases to about 30 over the last 20 years.

There are multiple channels where you can donate and find ways to raise money for them (How can I help Save the Children? | Save the Children UK) one of their largest fundraisers is the well-known Xmas Jumper appeal which has raised over £35milln since 2012, they are also working looking closely at their carbon footprint as a non-profit with projects focusing on sustainability, climate change and recycling. An exciting new movement is you can now recycle your xmas jumpers in their newly modernised & re-modelled charity shops which are attracting a new audience of re-cyclers.

Thanking Dani for her presentation Alan Bailey enquired about the challenges of working with other organisations. President Dick Dixon said that the club would make a donation towards their work.