The charity I discovered in our surrounding area is one called SCOOP. I had never heard about this organization before. SCOOP stands for Supporting Children Out of Poverty. They have worked in Cambodia and India, Syria and Iraq an began expanding into Direct Provision Centres in Ireland. They are also part of Erasmus projects which promote and safeguard the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and migrants.
Their mission is to empower displaced and marginalized young people to fulfill their potential in Ireland and abroad. I got lost down a rabbit hole while exploring this website. The work these two brothers have done is amazing and I was in awe of how dedicated they are to the cause. They offer education and recruitment and the arts learning opportunities.
I think I could start by encouraging the children to explore this link and make some notes based on questions I have given them. They could create a brief presentation on their discoveries and any interesting or surprising things they learned. They have so many projects, such as a GAA link in Cambodia, I am sure it would appeal to all the children. We could then look at how we could help – fundraising? 6th class do a charity cake sale every year in aid of charities of their choice. Perhaps this could be one. We could contact them and see if we could set up ‘penpals’ with some of the children they have helped in other countries. This could be an excellent project to develop global citizenship and empathy with the greater world.
To welcome refugees into our country the children themselves came up with International Day in our school. We asked families of the children of all nationalities to come into our hall and set up a stand. They could bring in pictures, documents, objects, food – this was a popular one, art work, clothes etc. This was inclusive of every nationality in the school and the amount of parents that came in to set up these stands was amazing. We had a timetable for each class to visit the hall and then after school they stayed on and we encouraged parents to visit also. Everyone said it was a huge success and the families who came to teach us about their countries and lives there were really overwhelmed with the day and were delighted. We will definitely be doing this again.