PBIS students awarded NAE Charitable Foundation Grant

Based on our long-term collaboration with a Czech NGO which produces expert trauma support for child refugees, Češi pro Sýrii, as well as our work with Dignity and UNICEF, Hibiki and Sabina designed a project to extend and expand our school’s volunteering work with refugees. 

Češi pro Sýrii was founded in 2018 during the Syrian crisis. The NGO has worked with refugee children across Europe, especially those living in refugee camps in Turkey. Now the organisation is helping support refugee children arriving in the Czech Republic. 

At PBIS, Vlastina campus is already offering activities for refugees on weekday evenings. After the Easter holiday, this will be extended to weekend sessions and may be available in our other campuses too. 

The grant will enable our students, parents and staff volunteers to take part in special workshops led by expert trainers to help them run activities for refugee children with a focus on supporting their wellbeing and helping them feel settled in the local area. The grant will also allow us to buy resources for the workshops specifically linked to supporting refugee children with their wellbeing. In addition, we will support Češi pro Sýrii in printing their trauma handbook for caregivers in Ukranian, as well as working with them to develop their website for refugees in the Czech Republic. Finally, we plan to create Ukranian mini-libraries or “KnihoBudky” on our campuses.

Get involved:

• Get trained! We aim to offer our first expert workshop for volunteers in May. Attending will help you understand some of the problems child refugees face when they move to a new country, how they might process trauma and how best to support them. 
• Volunteer! We will open Vlastina campus on Saturday afternoons to offer activities for refugee children. Some activities strarted earlier this term in Vlastina in the evenings and there are a growing number of families attending.
• Help Češi pro Sýrii create an informative website for refugees - in Ukrainian, English and Czech. This is the biggest priority for the NGO at the moment.
• Source Ukranian books for mini-libraries on our Vlastina and Kamyk campuses which children can borrow and swop regularly.
• Use your design and/or DIY skills to create the "library boxes" ("knihobudky") for the Ukranian mini-libraries. 
• Use your research and analysis skills to measure the impact of the project - and improve it further. Both Sabina and Hibiki are very aware that the situation in Ukraine, and the situation of refugees in the Czech Republic, is very new and quickly changing. Therefore, they included flexibility in their project proposal which will allow us to adapt to changing needs and regularly review the impact of the project so it can be as effective as possible. 
• Share your ideas: if you have your own ideas about how we could make the project even more effective, share them with Sabina, Hibiki or Ms Tichotova.