Physical Health Thailand Project #47890

Online database for 100 Thai Children's Homes

by Family Connection Foundation

Online database for 100 Thai Children's Homes

Project Report | Jun 12, 2023
Child at Risk System Update #2

By Ric Poolman | Board Member and Co-Founder of DigiServe

Our Thai trainer, standing on the right, is great!

Dear Partners,

In our Feb update, I reported on the new app development called The Family Strengthening app. This is still ongoing and I hope to provide more details in the next report. Recently, however, we began to update a similar app for another social program called Education Matters that we developed last year. The program provides scholarships for 200 students who are living with their families but need help to go to school. The students also have mentors that check in on them regularly to see how they are doing. Our app helps to track the program details for each student and monitors their progress.

In May, after the Thailand's summer break from school, DigiServe conducted a training session for 36 students from the Care Corner Foundation on the topic of "Basic PowerPoint Usage." The training is being held every Saturday from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM and will continue until the end of July. These kids are eager to learn and really enjoy our Thai trainer, Mr Dear.

Also in May, DigiServe provided training on the use of the CARS (Child at Risk System) program to the TawSaeng Foundation. TawSaeng, an after-school program, gives at-risk, abused and vulnerable children knowledge, love, education, and social development to improve their quality of life and better understand their self-worth and the protection of child-rights. Our training aimed to benefit the foundation in terms of effectively managing and storing data related to the children they serve. It is hoped that this program will significantly enhance their future work efficiency.

Your partnership with us is what makes it possible to work with these children and new Foundation clients. Thank you for your generousity.

Mr Dear, trainer, IT support, CARS. Helps TawSaeng

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Feb 15, 2023
CARS Update 2023 #1

By Ric Poolman | Director - DigiServe, a project of FCF

Training the trainers to use CARS

Dear Friends,

I last reported of the struggles we had connecting with more Children's homes and needing to provide more tools. The work is underway with our new Family Strengthening app which will work beside our current Child at Risk system (CARs). The new app will help Foundations seeking to keep children with their families by providing financial support and mentoring. This enables the children to go to school and the family to improve their living situation. Our app collects information regarding the families and allows the Foundation to track progress of multiple families. The goal is to help stablize the families after one year so they can continue on their own. The benefit is that children get to stay with their families which is a much better solution when possible than to take them out. And, for the same amount of money that it takes a Foundation to provide residential care for one child, they can support 10 families.

As we work on this new app, we continue to reach out to Children's Homes who still need help with their residential children. In December, we started working with a large Foundation that is partnering with other orgnaizations in the north to provide care for over 2 thousand Myanmar refugee childlren. We trained some trainers who in turn went north to train more people to start collecting and putting in the data to be able to identify and care for each of these children. We are excited that these children who are in such a difficult situation will receive good care.

In another new development, we have been sending two of our IT Trainers each Saturday to teach about 30 youths at one of our partner Children's Home. They are training them in basic skills in MS Word and Excel. Training youths is not one of our core services but when another organization provided them with new computers, they asked us to do the training. We want out partners to be successful in developing their children, so we saw it as a good opportunity to support them.

This year we have several homes that we are following up with to see if they could benefit from CARS and we should have the new app deployed in the first home by mid-year. Once they begin using it, we will begin promoting it to other homes. Most homes may not compeletely switch from residential care to keeping kids in their families but we are hoping more will start it as an addition to their residential care. It is a win-win for children and the homes. With our tool to help manage the information and track progress, it should be even easier for them to get started.

Thank you for your partnership.

Remote training for CARS

Training youths with digital skills

More training of youths

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Oct 18, 2022
Working on new features to help more children

By Ric Poolman | Director - DigiServe, a project of FCF

Ric sharing at Children's Home Association in June

Dear Partners,

Our last report indicated all good news as we thought we be launching with several new children’s homes. We also had a list of a dozen children’s homes from the Children’s Home Association that we spoke at in June. However, things have not worked out as we hoped. We did a couple of more demos, spoke to all dozen of the interested Homes, and did our best to contact serval others. The problem seems to be two-fold: either it is about money and the prospect of having to pay something later or they don’t feel our current features are meeting their real needs. The government is not asking for reports which is the main thing our software was providing and we cannot yet provide new homes with the ability to track families and scholarships for children to stay in the home and go to school.

In addition, I have been away from Thailand for the last 4 months trying to raise new funding. During the next two months, I’ll be back to work full time albeit remotely for the next 3 months before we can actually get back into Thailand. In the meantime, our goal is to complete the new features relating to families and scholarships and start testing them before I even get back. We believe that this is what the Homes are asking for now and we can help them scale their work with families in order to keep more children with their families. A recent study by a local university notes that 55% of children in Thailand do not live with their parents. We want to help change that and support more families so that they can keep their children and ensure they will still have a chance to thrive and get an education.

Your gifts to this project go directly to hosting our software so that Homes do not have to pay for it and thereby reducing the barriers to expanding their work and helping more children.

Thank you for your support.

The full team who each had a time to share

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