Global Family Care Network was established with the belief that long-term alternative care for at-risk and abandoned children is best practiced within the structure of a family. The organization’s focus is currently in India, Nepal and Myanmar with efforts to be launched in the US and Canada in 2014. Our model is supported by numerous studies indicating that family care, in lieu of institutional care, provides the best possible outcome for children with respect to their social and psychological development as well as their economic success. Global Family’s shelter homes accommodate children who find themselves in vulnerable situations. Each child’s physical and psychological needs are met before being restored back with their families or placed in long-term family care.

Family care projects require further certification to you achieve quality and desired outcomes of your efforts. Projects are required to have at least a four star rating on Global Family’s 5 Star Evaluation System. The following five criteria are used to rate your family care project.

1. Background Checks
A home study and background check on each child is undertaken to ensure that no pre-existing family option is available.

2. Primary Caregivers
The relationships that children have with primary volunteer caregivers foster significant positive emotional and psychological results. Therefore, caregivers should work out of a sense of compassion and call rather than for financial benefit.

3. Stability
Caregivers commit to long-term service so that children do not have to suffer the trauma of continual re-bonding with parental figures. When a caregiving unit is established it is kept together until the children grow to adulthood without adding or removing siblings.

4. Unit Size
Each family unit should house no more than ten children and should have it’s own sleeping, bathing, eating and socializing spaces as well as a separate, designated caregiver.

5. Quality Care
Each child should receive individual care and attention. Both the spirit as well as the daily routine of the home should reveal a fun, loving, nurturing environment where children receive structure, encouragement, praise, consistency and good role models from their caregivers and older siblings. Children should also receive adequate levels of nutrition, education and health care.

Underage at-risk children with family/parents
Most organizations that intercept or are given children who are associated with the trafficking issue (impoverished and displaced, runaways, intercepted at the border, brought by police, rescued from the brothel, children of prostitutes, etc.) are very eager to house them in ‘homes of hope’, ‘children’s homes’, orphanages, or other visible institutions. Although an overwhelming number of studies have demonstrated that children who are raised by their parents fare better (even when parents are poor, have ‘immoral occupations’, live in inadequate communities, or are single) than in institutions, many organizations prefer to house the children themselves instead of restore them to their original families. We believe that this practice mirrors rather than challenges the spirit that drives traffickers themselves as the children continue to be exploited for financial gain even after their ‘rescue.’ Our approach is restoration. We want to quickly and gently return the children to their own families and believe that no other reason to remove or keep children from their families is acceptable. We only take children when the legal system has deemed their families unfit because of abuse or neglect.

Underage at-risk children without family/parents
Most organizations continue to rely on institutional approaches to care for children who do not have families, despite studies indicating that the next best option for children without families is to be placed in a foster care family moving toward adoption. We are committed to working through the difficult challenges of governments and social practices to develop family care systems modeled after international foster care adoption

Of age victims of trafficking
Most organizations are eager to help children escape exploitation, the brothels, or living on the street. However, they often keep these children for extended periods of time and do not seem eager to move children to independence. Global Family wants to free victims not just from the abuse of their former lives as slaves or prostitutes but also from an identity that prevents them from being fully reintegrated into society. Our aftercare program focuses on independence, freedom, job training, counseling, and discipleship in atmospheres of community. Once they are old enough, they are supported with the necessary tools to be released into employment, marriage, and adult life as they choose. We encourage our partners to help more children and provide them with better outcomes by quickly restoring them to their families or placing them in new families. Our goal is to prepare children for life apart from their past abuse.

Global Family supports and strengthens existing community assets with the idea that the best opportunities originate from local, rather than outside, advantages. We aim to support individuals and associations that already exist in at-risk regions to create and implement community based solutions. The key is first to empower individuals with the skills and social support they need to envision an improved future, then to identify key assets and mobilize resources. Asset based community solutions come directly from the associations that exist on a local scale, driven by local people, and supported by local talent and resources. Global Family’s role is to assist identifying assets, empowering individuals, strengthening integral social relationships in local associations, and accommodating the mobilization of key resources. We believe that long-lasting solutions come from the people who engage daily with local forms of social capital and who endure the issues at hand.

The most effective social change is brought about when multiple community stakeholders are included in discussion and action of integrated solutions. Global Family has identified four key ‘fields’ that are both necessary for our projects, but also have great influence over the ability of our projects to succeed and the direction that they will go. These fields are community, faith group, development agency, and donor. The expectations, biases, and needs of each field vary, but the outcomes that yield the best results are those that are produced by the strengths, collaborative efforts, and contributions of each.
In ‘vortex’ methodology, community, faith group, development agency (Global Family), and donor all participate in identifying the need, crafting a message that suits this need, coaching change agents within the target community, and evaluating the outcome.

Throughout this process there is a transformation of mindset, values, attitudes, and behaviors within each field. The message itself is informed by each field, transformed in dialogue, produced into culture change tools, delivered back to the field through change agents, and evaluated according to the desired outcomes.

This model of integrated collaboration and commitment of resources drives many of Global Family’s endeavors. For instance, we believe that dialogue amongst fields is integral to the transformation of the current state of child aftercare in Nepal. North American donors and Nepali churches have attempted a program of compassion to help children in need, but have excluded input from local communities and NGO best practice specialists.

While we are working towards improving collective actions amongst these fields in Nepali childcare as a whole, many of Global Family’s projects are formed through integrated participation amongst fields. In 2010, a group of North American college students, working with local Nepali church representatives, NGO personnel, and Nepali women and girls, developed a girls’ empowerment curriculum called Bhitri Sundarta. We have seen huge demand for this material, with possibilities of it being used by public schools, local churches, and other community organizations. The goal of the curriculum is to provide knowledge and mentorship to girls who are at-risk of being trafficked and abused in their communities, and to enable them to protect themselves. The curriculum is a culture change tool that reorients the value of a Nepali girl. Clubs that are formed around it are facilitated and driven by volunteers in local communities, making the reproduction and maintenance of the clubs sustainable. This project demonstrates the potential of a dedicated team to develop messages that can be delivered back to the donor, NGO, faith group, and community fields towards protecting children.

We are volunteer driven and volunteer dependent. All of our community workers are volunteers, and so are our caregivers who partner with us to take in abused, exploited, and at-risk children. Because caregivers are volunteers, and are not paid for their work, they have an equal investment in the lives of the children they care for. This enables us to work towards the best practices of aftercare and make sure that families are created out of a common goal to protect children.

The Direct to the Need sponsorship model works to engage donors while supporting overseas family strengthening efforts, undertaken by local volunteer clubs and organizations in at-risk communities preventing the breakdown of families. The idea is that $12.00 a month supports the efforts of a club and the various activities that they hold in their communities. It’s a $0.40 a day sponsorship that is accessible to nearly all income levels.

90% of all donated funds are sent directly to the local volunteer family caregivers, Daughter Project club members, and community organizers in communities with high poverty rates. These funds are given with no conditions or strings attached, but rather to trusted and trained partners and caregivers running local initiatives that protect children and preserve families. The remaining 10% is given to Global Family paid

Donors receive reports directly from our overseas partners, projects, and volunteers, or straight from outreach workers if they sponsor a club. We value financial and operational transparency in order to improve exposure to our projects.

Agenda One is a pilot project that seeks to bolster the local efforts to protect children. Value and culture change campaigns work through messaging conduits, including events, social media, television, and print media.

Global Family avoids redundancy in staff using web based sponsorship reporting and dependence upon local volunteers. This way, our program implementation and evaluation procedures avoid excess, slow, or bureaucratic organization.

Global Family desires to share the various approaches that are developed through its network as well as promote and train other childcare organizations to follow the how matters aftercare approach. We recruit, train, and fund partner programs that we have identified as embodying the best practices of childcare.

The Daughter Project is a holistic, asset based approach to counter the trafficking and abuse of young girls. We work with local authorities, community based organizations and volunteers to prevent, intercept and restore young girls back to their families. Much emphasis is placed upon awareness campaigns held in rural communities, educating residents about the dangers of trafficking and sexual exploitation. Bhitri Sundarta, a girls’ club curriculum, teaches girls to value themselves as daughters and find supportive community through which they learn to be good friends, set goals, and grow up as strong women and role models, ultimately helping young girls to protect themselves and support their peers.

If your project engages in sheltering, rehabilitation, and restoration, a further certification is required that will help you achieve quality and desired outcomes of your efforts. This includes the Daughter Project How Matters Guidelines for victim care.

The Daughter Project helps affiliates engaged in sheltering, rehabilitation, and restoration to best remove the trauma and stigma of exploitation faced by women and girls who are victims of trafficking and systematic abuse. We certify projects that present girls with better future outcomes by restoring them to their families or placing them in new families and preparing them for life apart from their past abuse.

Many approaches to helping victims that can closely be associated with the trafficking issue (poor displaced, runaways, intercepted at the border, brought by police, rescued from the brothel, girl children of prostitutes etc.) house these girls in ‘homes of hope’, ‘children’s homes’, orphanages, or other visible institutions. Although studies have overwhelmingly demonstrated that children do best with their parents (even when parents are poor, have ‘immoral occupations’, live in bad communities or are from single parent homes) than in institutions. Approaches that justify keeping rescued girls in order to ‘protect’ them and use them to build visible and profitable work mirrors rather than challenges traffickers as the girls continue to be exploited for financial gain after their ‘rescue’. Rather, we certify approaches that focus upon healing and restoration. These projects address physical and psychological trauma and at the same time work to promptly and gently return girls to their own families.

When the legal system has deemed a victim’s family unfit because of abuse or neglect and your project proposes long-term care of the children, you should apply for Direct Good certification through the Family Care category.