The Links of Hope team have had a flying start to 2023 – in the third week of January our founding Board Members John and Deb Bromley visited PNG and had a Team Building Day with our staff. The day was spent celebrating successes and learnings from 2022, taking part in an interactive session designing Links of Hope team t-shirts from 2023 with Eileen and the team from Canvas Corner PNG, and being equipped and inspired for the year ahead. We welcomed Lesieli Traviri, Country Head of Kina Bank, and her team to the day who presented us with their annual contribution of K100,000, in memory of their employee and our founding Board Member Nancy Moka.
Since January our Teams have been active in Port Moresby and Mount Hagen equipping our LOH children to return to school for the year with uniforms, shoes and backpacks kindly donated by Westpac.
We have new team members who have added value to our teams – including a Community Nurse, and Adherence Counsellor and 2 university interns filling roles in Administration and Business Development.
As well as an ongoing focus on core business of pastoral care and support of the 320 children on our program, our project focus for 2023 will be in 3 key areas:-
Training and Education Pathways for our adolescents
Expansion of our Health Education curriculum, training and programming
Working alongside key partners (UNICEF, Office of Family Services, Femilli PNG) to advance the agenda for Child Protection in PNG context, with focus on referral pathways, service providers and capacity issues
Respite Home News
In January our Respite Home received a kind donation from Solar Solutions in the provision and installation of internal and external lights for our home – which has made a huge difference in terms of cost savings, safety for our team and children there and the ability for children to carry on homework and activities even when there are power outages.
In February we were grateful to receive a timely donation from the British High commission which enabled us to fund some storage lockers for our respite children as well as some outdoor furniture, storage shelves, uniforms and stationery supplies and a projector.
In March we received the news that the New Zealand High commission in Port Moresby will fund completion of our renovation works at the Respite Home.
Staff Profile
Mathew Ote – Community Nurse
Mathew joined us in January this year and is heading up our community health work and pastoral care team. He has been hugely effective in locating and communicating with children and their carers who, for various reasons, have defaulted at clinic visits and care package pick-ups. Mathew is a qualified nurse and he is also a talented artist – he created this beautiful piece for our office!
Mathew recently ran a weekend workshop at our Respite Home, teaching and guiding our children there to produce some painted masterpieces!
Health Department collaboration
We are grateful for continued collaboration and mutual support with medical teams at both Port Moresby General Hospital and Mount Hagen Provincial Hospital. This year we have already been a part of the Paediatric HIV meeting at Port Moresby General Hospital to address high lost- to- follow-up cases and the growing concern in adolescent HIV and HIV drug resistance. This month we meet with the medical team to discuss service provision and collaboration with other partners at Mount Hagen Provincial Hospital.
Training and Education Pathways for Adolescents
As we seek funding opportunities from previous and new partnerships for this important project, we are starting to make some connections with potential employers and training institutions.
We have already taken on one of our adolescents in Mount Hagen as a trainee, assisting our team with pastoral care visits to children in remote locations and we have assisted one of adolescents in Port Moresby to enrol and provided equipment and uniform for his Carpentry Certificate at Badilli Vocational College.
Links of Hope Coffee
If you’ve been following our Facebook and Instagram pages, you will have seen we are venturing into marketing some coffee as a means to raise essential operational funding for our work. We have some incredible quality Sungi honey coffee from the Jiwaka province - birthplace of our own John Bromley. John is in connection with his ‘wantoks’ looking at supply chain logistics and quality control and at the ‘front end’ we are looking at potential markets for our coffee in Australia and the UK. We’re chatting with roasters, our UK team are just about to head to the London Coffee Festival and we’re currently still selling via our website our test market batch of coffee – we would love your feedback, so please follow the link and grab yourself a bag. The coffee has been sampled so far from Port Moresby to Brisbane to London to Kenya – all with a massive thumbs up to our unique medium roast arabica beans with natural honey overtones!
We thank all our individual supporters and sponsors as well as our corporate donors and funders and all those who support the work of Links of Hope in so many ways.
We value your support and your trust in us and be assured we are ever committed to our cause to ‘empower individuals and impact communities one link at a time’ in Papua New Guinea.
In March we celebrated 10 years of existence – being registered as a not-for-profit Association in Papua New Guinea. We are now registered charities also in both Australia and the UK and send heartfelt thanks to our committed board members in all 3 countries who work tirelessly, giving up their own time, to support our cause, spread the word and raise funds to support our work on the ground in PNG.