2019 - THE FIRST 8 MONTHS.

In the first 3 months of the year we completed work on our first Capacity Building programme. The report on this was submitted to our funders, the Scottish Government, in April. The new ZTA Strategic Plan 2018-2022 was completed and launched in February 2019. It sets out our aims and direction for the next 4 years.  It is the culmination of all our capacity building work in 2018-19 and was produced thanks to our grant funding from the Scottish Government.

Liz Hall and Simon Willoughby-Booth made a visit to Zambia,  in April/May 2019. Liz delivered a very successful workshop for teachers, psychologists and others who work with children. The training workshops were on trauma recovery approaches for children and young people and were held at UTH. Twenty two people completed the training and, based on the very positive feedback we received, this may be a future strand of work for ZTA. Liz's visit was funded in part by MAITS,  (Multi Agency International Training and Support). Simon was able to with some key  people in Zambia and with the Zambian trainers group, ZART,  to support and plan the next phase of the group's development.

We held our AGM on 28th May and said goodbye to Colin Boxer, who is stepping down after 2 years as a trustee. His input has been invaluable and he has helped to guide ZTA through a period of development and growth. Two new trustees have joined the Board - Scott Renton and Rachel Bruce and Lesley Hill has re-joined the board. We are looking forward to working with them. Our trustees are now Joanna Pearce, Vera Steele, Simon Willoughby-Booth, Scott, Rachel and Lesley. Joanna gave the Chair's report on our work over the last year and our successful application for a second Capacity Building grant from the Scottish Government for 2019/20.

Margarate Munakampe, presented a poster titled "The Zambia Therapeutic Art Course: Improving Mental health in Zambia" at the Zambia Quality Improvement Conference, held in Lusaka from 4-6 June. Margarate is our link person with SCHEME at University of Zambia. Kestone Lyambai, one of the ZART trainers and a lecturer at UNZA, was also able to attend the poster session and the conference. This was the first time we have been represented at this conference and we are delighted to get wider recognition for our work.

Joanna presented ZTA's work at the International Art Therapy Practice/Research Conference, 11-13 July in London, England. She was part of a joint presentation, Art Therapy in Africa: Now and Next, with four other presenters who described very varied approaches to developing work in sub-Saharan Africa. The panel session was well attended and was our first opportunity to present the work in Zambia to an international audience of art therapists.

We began this year's Capacity Building work during the visit to Zambia in April, focussing on developing training projects for the ZART trainers in response to their requests and on developing the fundraising and digital resources of the charity in Scotland. We have established links with Challenges Worldwide who are a social enterprise training NGO, based in Lusaka, and with the Psychology Association of Zambia. We plan to set up training packages with their involvement.

Joanna will be making the next visit to Zambia and will be there from 29th August to 30th September. She will taking forward the training projects, linking to a wide range of key Zambian people and organisations and setting up a new Therapeutic Art training in Livingstone. It will be a very busy month and we have lots to do to achieve our aims in this year's capacity building work!