Online database for 100 Thai Children's Homes

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.