Clear Sky Children’s Charity

2023 grant recipient

The delivery of two 10 week programmes for Afghan families based at Milton Hill Hotel has now been completed. These were extremely well received and a great deal of learning was gathered from the experience of working with this specific demographic. New relationships have been forged with Asylum Welcome and the charity has been asked to provide further support for refugees by Oxfordshire County Council as a result of the work already done.

A case study about the outcomes is planned and will be shared with funders to enable the charity to deliver more group support to refugee communities in the region. There are also plans to provide additional resources and training for the organisation’s network of therapists. This will allow them to deliver this work to families in their communities and to provide some supporting resources to schools, which will help them to understand the challenges that refugee children face when integrating into an unfamiliar environment following trauma.

Project Summary

This project has provided support for Afghan refugee families who have been displaced through conflict and who are experiencing complex trauma, and are in shared living conditions in Milton. The established and accredited Heart to Heart programme has been offered to parent and child groups over a period of 10 weeks by qualified play and creative arts therapists.

Case Study

We were delighted to receive Didcot Powerhouse funding to support families who had been displaced through conflict. Funding was used to offer a 7-week intervention, to 3 families (7 children and their parents). To ensure this work ran successfully, we developed a new approach to delivering our therapeutic parenting programme. We adopted recommended guideline methodologies from the UN whilst developing this project, and were able to engage with Asylum Welcome to help us to broach the cultural and language barriers that we encountered. This project aimed to include psycho-education sessions for groups of parents within the large refugee population who are housed in our locality and to include (in the young people’s therapy sessions), psycho education about conflict and displacement.

The outcomes of this project allowed us to find out what this specific type of group would find helpful by running this as a pilot scheme. The project itself required several adaptations to our existing processes, including provision of our parent information in English, Dari and Pashto, plus the adaptation and translation of our‘ Head, Heart, Hands’ infocards.

A hugeheartwarming thank you to the Didcot Powerhouse Fund for supporting this highly impactful intervention and to Asylum Welcome whose input was invaluable. It was an honour to facilitate such a powerful piece of work, and we would be thrilled tosupport families displaced through conflict further in the future.