 and take home a trophy.
Pack 867 also participates in the Boy Scout Popcorn sale through Trails End as our annual fundraiser.
We are also focused on helping the community. Pack 867 marches in Alexandria’s annual Presidents’ Day parade. We help area churches in our community do annual cleanups. We also participate in the annual Scouting for Food drive to help stock our area food pantries each November.
Pack 867 is a member of the National Capital Area Council, which serves the Washington, D.C. Metro area, including 16 counties in Maryland and Virginia, The U.S. Virgin Islands and those families who are serving abroad in North and South America.
For more information on joining or how you can become involved, please email our membership chair at pack867membershipchair@gmail.com.
Please visit our Facebook page for more information."Keeping the tradition of handmade flatware alive, the artisans of Puiforcat strive for harmony in every piece, utilizing meticulous techniques passed down from generations of silversmiths.
Founded in 1820 in Paris, the close attention to detail and design in Puiforcat dinnerware allows it to stand alone as a benchmark of quality and beauty."My friend Linda suggested this one… maybe you can try it?.
If you’re a digital photo household, don’t let these pictures sit around forever, sites like KodakGallery.com will accept your film and convert it to digital. I think you can even do it at Walgreens.
ProfileWelcome to our newsletter. This is a shorter version than normal, but we are trying to keep you as up to date as possible. Do let us know what you think and please do share as widely as you can, to your staff and volunteers, management committee and supporters. We want to spread the message far and wide…
NACCC’s submission to the Public Bill Committee on the Domestic Abuse Bill
In response to the Domestic Abuse Bill 2019-21 NACCC is seeking an amendment to the Bill to ensure ‘all Child Contact Centres and organisations that offer facilities or services for child contact to be accredited in England and Wales.’ Our President Sir James Munby said the amendment will ensure that “every child can experience the same high level of care and safeguarding where circumstances have necessitated their involvement with the family justice system and Child Contact Centres or Services”. If adopted the proposal means all Child Contact Centres and Services will be appropriately and consistently managed and that standards and safeguarding are of a high and consistent quality across England and Wales.
The Public Bill Committee has now completed its work. The Bill is now due to have its report stage and third reading in the House of Commons before moving to the House of Lords.
Seminar: Child contact centres in lockdown and beyond
A webinar ‘Child Contact Centres in Lockdown and Beyond’ was organised featuring talks by Sir James Munby (President of NACCC), Elizabeth Coe (Chief Executive Officer) and Philip Coleman (Service Development Manager). The seminar explained the work NACCC was doing providing a safe system of work for centres providing video contact during the pandemic. There was an opportunity for centres to submit questions.
A recording of the seminar can be found on this link:
NACCC would like to thank Anne Dillon (Vice Chair of NACCC) and 42 Bedford Row Barristers for hosting the event.
Video contact providing precious moments for families
Since the covid-19 outbreak over 50 centres have been providing contact services for families using technology despite their venues being closed. This has been a time that has affected all relationships but has particularly impacted on children not able to see family members due to parental separation. However, NACCC accredited contact centres have risen to the occasion and have ventured into new territory with some surprising and unexpected results for families. Stories of the amazing work being done have been coming through which we wanted to share with you.
“Using technology to facilitate contact has brought some surprising and unexpected opportunities for families… this is a new opportunity for contact centres for the future, with people now realising that distance is not a limiting factor for contact.”
Family Ties like other providers were inundated with requests to continue facilitating contact. They investigated several solutions working with families, security experts and professionals to find an optimum solution for families. They told us:
“Ensuring and maintaining family links was found critically important for those children where the lockdown and parental separation had put a stop to the majority of face-to-face encounters. But during this time using technology to facilitate the contact, some surprising and unexpected opportunities for families to do things in during contact they have never achieved before.”
“The first thing we started with was a pre-contact meeting with both parties to ensure technology worked, and the rules of contact with clear expected outcomes were explained. Arranging 30min sessions for the contact was seen as the optimum time for the virtual contact session with most children. But that did not mean all contacts lasted the full 30mins and both parties were made aware of this during pre-contact meeting.”
“Contact included helping with home schooling, story time to interactive games. Using the guidelines from NACCC and other professionals we helped families move from unstructured to really structured positive contact. Parties used to telephone calls with poor interaction were supported to a situation with both parties excited to fill the full 30mins with activities.”
“So far Family Ties has facilitated over 100 sessions with multiple ages of children from 6months old to 14 years old. All sessions are very different from a 6-month old playing peekaboo to all sorts of stories around films and games they have played. The key thing out of all sessions was to make sure they ended on a positive note. Ensuring that keeping all parties updated and ensuring contact started on-time and was consistent meant that all were happy with the sessions. This does add a new opportunity for contact centres for the future, with people now realising that distance is not a limiting factor for contact. By using a third party has helped families to ensure problem phone calls can be replaced by a positive virtual contact.”
“We have been able to identify children who feel nervous about seeing their parent face-to-face and who maybe haven’t done so for a number of months or years and give them this opportunity to begin contact in this way…”
Video contact has been a new service for Cheltenham Child Contact Centre which has been set up over the last month. Sarah, Co-ordinator describes their experience:
“I couldn’t help feel disappointed when lockdown was announced for those children who would miss out on seeing the parent they don’t live with and can only see in the safety of a contact centre. It was important to me that we were able to offer facetime contact for these children. Our staff have been working hard to set this up and have seen this grow and grow over the last few weeks. We have now begun to start new referrals which have come through to the centre over the lockdown period.”
“For me as manager, seeing a child and her father have their first session of facetime was one of those moments worth ‘getting out of bed for’ – to witness an 8-year-old girl talk and talk to her father for the hour’s session was lovely. The father also had a letter and some pictures from the girl’s grandparents which he read to her, making her smile more and more. The whole session from start to finish was awe inspiring and I feel a privilege to be a part of that special moment. The girl’s mum (resident parent) said that her father could facetime her on her birthday and I sat on the call for this. This was something that without this means to do contact, could never have happened. The girl’s father told me.
“These sessions on Zoom have been really valuable to me, without them, I wouldn’t have been able to maintain contact with my daughter. They have also helped me with my mental health, I have been suffering a bit lately, the zoom sessions really do lift my mood and make my day.”
I think what has been the best thing about these facetime contact sessions is that we have been able to identify children who feel nervous about seeing their parent face to face and who maybe haven’t done so for a number of months or years and give them this opportunity to begin contact in this way. We feel at the Cheltenham Child Contact Centre that this will become another tool in our contact belt and we will continue to use this in certain situations once face to face contact can resume. We can identify a number of cases where this is a great means for beginning contact, as another part in the stepping-stones of resuming normal contact once more. Cheltenham Contact Centre has been able to offer this to children of all ages including sibling groups. It’s been wonderful to be a part of this lockdown experience for these families and even though like others we are hoping to resume face to face contact soon, we feel we have been able to maintain family relationships with children and a parent they no longer live with in what has been these unprecedented times.”
A useful contingency but not a replacement for face-to-face contact with #digitalpoverty affecting many
This is not the end of the story. Video contact may be a useful tool for centres to harness as they start to reopen. Children and parents living in different parts of the country may be able to keep in touch to a degree who would not have been able to previously. Service families with a parent deployed overseas for long periods may also find this helpful if contact is a struggle. NACCC is committed to supporting any member centre considering using video contact in the future.
We have produced a micro site for its members and external organisations with full guidance on using technology to enable contact to happen. The site contains an overview, a step by step guide, guidance on how