Study Week on Children with Imprisoned Parents History;
In 2010 Francis Ssuubi the founder of Wells of Hope Ministries conceived an idea of organizing
the first International Conference on children with imprisoned parents, he made a website and
started sending out invitations to people whom he found on the internet, and he targeted social
workers and lawyers and caregivers of children with imprisoned parents and researchers.
Out of about 300 invitations sent out, we got a response from Dr. Owen Gill and Mona Kasarp .
4 months to the conference, we realized we had not got the target number of people, so Francis
wrote to Dr. Owen Gill who had confirmed that he was coming informing him that we had
postponed the conference to 2011.
Dr. Owen Gill wrote back saying that Barnados UK the charity he worked for had already
released the funds for his travel plus paying for an expensive British flight ticket for him to travel
to and from Uganda. He tried to get British airways refund the flight money, but they could not.
So Dr. Owen wrote asking if he could simply come on a study tour to learn about Wells of Hope
work.
We did accept and we did our best, to organize a good program for him to make sure he got the
best and an eventful week in Uganda.
At the end of the visit, we sat with him and he offered us consultancy, he informed us that,
organizing a conference takes a lot and costs a lot of money, and he said that if we went ahead to
organize another conference we would meet same response, and as such recommended that we
organize study week and invite people to come to go through the same experience that he had
gone through. He also wrote a report about his visit , in which he described Wells of Hope work
through a triangle approach , which he called THE ‘TRIANGLE’ OF THE CHILD , THE
FAMILY AND THE PARENT IN PRISON . And this has since been adopted to be Wells of
Hope Intervention model Click here Dr.Owen report
Following Dr. Owen’s consultation to Wells of Hope and advice, we went ahead and changed
the conference to study week, and immediately started inviting people to come for the study
week.
The study week has grown over the years, and from lessons learned we have made it more
exciting, eventful, inspiring and educational to the people who participate in it.