Hope for Children

Hope For Children Partners L-R: Dan Krutz, Melanie Davis, Vesna Hart, Lou Ferman, Bud Heckman, Nabil Abukhader, Amy Potter; not pictured: Zack Shaeffer

The Hope for Children program is offered by Religions for Peace-USA through the US Fund for UNICEF.

Hope for Children aims to assist in addressing the psychological, social, and spiritual needs of the child victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita through a unique multi-religious approach. This one-year project partners Religions for Peace-USA with the Camp Noah project of the Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota, the Louisiana Interreligious Disaster Response Network, and the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program at Eastern Mennonite University.

Hope for Children Project aims to train volunteers of diverse religious communities to assist in disaster recovery with children and youth, offering resiliency camps for affected youth and continuing to foster programs that focus on enabling them to process their experiences and re-integrate more successfully.

In our initial proposal, RFP-USA identified four areas of focus for the Hope for Children program:
1. to equip carefully selected volunteers from religious communities to more effectively respond to disaster through trauma awareness and response trainings;
2. to enable religious communities to work cooperatively in offering facilities, volunteers, and other resources in response to the needs of the most marginalized children and youth;
3. to offer a safe camp environment for children and youth to process their reactions to the disaster and to build resilience and coping skills; and
4. to create educational materials distributed through U.S. religious communities, covering these multi-religious recovery efforts and the ongoing conditions of poverty that exasperated the condition.

In 2006, Rubina Madni and Nabil Abukhader adapted the Camp Noah curriculum for Muslim-sensitive use while Rabbi Daniel Segal helped render the Camp Noah curriculum into a Jewish-sensitive version. RFP-USA then used the STAR model to provide trauma awareness training seminars to youth impactors and partnered with Amy Potter and Vesna Hart of the STAR program and Lou Furman of Turning Point Partners to provide intensive and interactive training for care-givers.

On July 16-20, 2006 RFP-USA sponsored a 5-day resilience-based camp for children and youth in Gulf region. Students whose families had been evacuated from their homes participated in a program based on the Camp Noah model in an existing Muslim academy in Gretna, LA. Students participated in resiliency training and had opportunity to interact with people outside Muslim community. A further camp is planned for the winter break.

62 campers and 10 youth helpers participated in a Muslim-focused and hosted camp in Gretna, Louisiana on the edge of New Orleans.

In the summer of 2006, Ms. Joanne Tien of Religions for Peace - USA created a poverty report outlining the hurricanes’ disproportionate impact on the poor and minorities, with testimonies of survivors. The report has been sent to UNICEF and is also available here. Additionally, RFP-USA sponsored the development and modification of STAR facilitator training handbook on trauma awareness to aid in future disasters.