Supporting the Church Body to Keep Families Together
Tags: Community Strengthening | Economic Empowerment Working in partnership with local initiatives is an effective response to the needs of orphans and vulnerable children. Preventing family separation, and children being welcomed into new loving, safe, and stable families is what success looks [...]
Challenging Heights: Platforms for Children’s Voices to Be Heard
Tags: Community Strengthening Jesus was quick to say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them” (Matthew 19:14). His words were countercultural in a time and place when children’s voices were rarely heard; His words continue to [...]
Pivoting Methods to Create Sustainable Impact: One Woman’s Story of Transition to Family-Based Care
Tags: Community Strengthening | Economic Empowerment In the local Ugandan dialect, Akola means simply “she works.” Yet, for many Ugandan women and their families, it represents much more. Akola Project began in 2007 with the mission to empower women in [...]
Bright Hope: Providing Family Support through Church Partnership
Tags: Community Strengthening Children grow best in families. This is true whether a child is born into great wealth or extreme poverty. However, in far too many communities around the world, it is poverty that is preventing children from growing [...]
Foster Care India: Redefining India’s Continuum of Care
Tags: Foster Care | Economic Empowerment It is perhaps human nature that we gravitate toward stories with inspiring plots and resolved endings. Those of us tirelessly advocating for vulnerable children love stories of children placed in families happily ever after. [...]
The Image of God and the Abilities of All
Tags: Community Strengthening The United Nations declared today, December 3rd, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Around the world on this day, the abilities of all people are to be celebrated, even (and especially) those of vulnerable children. Followers [...]
Putting the Lonely in Families: The Journey of SFAC
Tags: Foster Care | Economic Empowerment The transformation of a child who is reintegrated into a family is always worthy of praise and thanksgiving. Yet few things are as noteworthy as the hundreds of children’s lives impacted by an adult [...]
Fostering Hope in Guatemala
Tags: Adoption | Foster Care | Community Strengthening | Economic Empowerment In Guatemala, when a child becomes an orphan, is a victim of abuse or exploitation, or is separated from family-based care, the primary response, historically, has been to place that [...]
Fuller Theological Seminary: Equipping Students in Family-Based Care
Tags: Community Strengthening Fuller Theological Seminary is helping students thoughtfully understand and support evidence-based practices in action as practitioners. Thought leaders around the country at centers of learning like the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller, work to mold the [...]
Quietly Investing in the Zimbabwean Church
Tags: Community Strengthening Where would you go if your family were on the verge of separation because you could no longer afford to feed your children? What if your support system—family, friends, community—were all in the midst of similar circumstances [...]
Reducing Stigma: Retrak’s Model of Reunifying Street Children With Families
Tags: Economic Empowerment For any child longing to be reunited with his or her family, the emotional and psychological hurdles can be enormous. This is particularly true for children being reintegrated with their families and communities after living on the streets—due to [...]
The Long Road Back: Transitioning to Family Care in Rwanda
Tags: Transitioning In Rwanda, an estimated 860,000 children and young people have lost one or both parents from the 1994 genocide, HIV and AIDS, or poverty. The strain that this has placed on families is overwhelming. In 2012 there were [...]
Project RED: Empowering Families for Abundant Lives
Tags: Community Strengthening El Salvador is the most densely populated country in Latin America and has the unfortunate standing as one of the world’s most violent countries. With this reality comes widespread poverty and a breakdown of the family structure across society. [...]
Children in Families: A Community Approach to Reintegration
Tags: Foster Care | Transitioning Everyone in Kampong knows Sopheat* — his mischievous laugh, his lively personality, his story. Sopheat was among the very first children to be placed with a foster family in Kampong, a Cambodian village of sweeping rice [...]
HelpKids Centre: Supporting the Love of Families in Sri Lanka
Tags: Transitioning | Economic Empowerment Family-based, alternative care for orphans and vulnerable children is on the rise in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Alison Atkinson and her husband Narel joined Australian Christian Churches International Relief (ACCI) 10 years ago, as field workers [...]