Covid Is the Best Excuse to Use Your Birthday 4 Good

You can’t go out. You can’t gather in large groups. Selfies with friends just don’t look the same when everyone is wearing a mask. So why not think hard about how you can use your birthday for good? For the price of sushi dinner with friends, you can change the life of a child in eastern Indonesia. More than 43% of children born in NTT, will be destined to a life devastated by stunting. But you can help change that! Stunting can be reduced by adopting a series of interventions that target specific risks of children during the first 1000 Days. Because the factors that underlie stunting  are multiple and complex, education is vital. Our blanket aims to educate and empower parents through easy-to-understand iconography, graphics and information about the health of their newborns. The 1000 Days Fund believes that accurate, accessible first 1000-days health information, delivered in a memorable, easily accessible way we can empower mothers and initiate behavioral change. 

Our goal is to introduce the blanket in several other high stunting rate areas of Indonesia, establish partnerships on the ground with like-minded NGOs to act as points of distribution.

Prior to the COVID19 pandemic, Indonesia was already burdened by high levels of malnutrition with more than five million children under-5 are stunted, and almost seven million children under-5 are malnourished.

For $50 USD you can send 6 blankets to pregnant moms in NTT. For $100 you can send 15 blankets and change the life of 15 pregnant moms and kids.

Your donation will be instrumental in allowing these children an opportunity to escape stunting by allowing our frontline village health workers to continue distributing smarts charts to mothers with children under-5. CHWs (or kader) are trained in an effort to give them the confidence needed to serve as fonts of knowledge in the village. Meanwhile, mothers are equipped with the knowledge needed to tackle stunting through a series of in-home visits that bring focus to the smart blanket.

The Selimut Cerdas is not only a wonderful gift for any new parent, it’s also a gift that makes a difference. Our blanket provides some of the most vital information and places it right at the parent’s fingertips.

So why not use your birthday for good? Donating today means changing the life of a child tomorrow, and there’s no birthday cake out there that tastes as good as changing someone’s life. [Z Petersen]