We’ve been asking some
of the members who have joined our coalition over the last decade to
share their thoughts on collaborating with Chab Dai. This week, Dale Edmonds of
Riverkids Foundation describes her journey and how Chab Dai has helped this
once-small NGO to grow…
“When we started our small charity, Riverkids Foundation, in
Cambodia nearly a decade ago,
we had a handful of staff, big ideas and dreams and a tiny
budget for about fifty children. Now we reach over six hundred children
directly each month, and we've worked with more than a thousand families at
risk of abusing and trafficking their children, including families where children
were sold to factories, forced marriages, paedophile rings by foreigners, gang
rapes, incest, infant deaths and worse.
The families we work with are among the most difficult and
heartbreaking, with complex multi-generational dysfunction and complications of
addiction, deep poverty and discrimination. And yet we've managed to bring the
rate of trafficking in our families to less than 1%. Next month we will
formally graduate over twenty of our families as 'Jasmine Elephant' families
with a community celebration - this means that they have become so stable and
supportive of their children that they can now leave our programme and flourish
on their own.
Chab Dai helped us do that. While Chab Dai doesn't work
directly with families, they took a tiny new organisation and made us far
stronger by introducing us to other partner organisations with a shared vision
to protect children, providing free or very heavily subsidised training for our
social workers and staff, giving our managers and team leaders support and
encouragement that could only come from a trusted local partner, and even
funding very technical and specific programme gaps that were too difficult for
most donors to understand the need for.
Chab Dai has created a community
that cares for children in Cambodia and supported us so
well - I think we would have closed at several points if it
hadn't been for the advice and help
you gave us. Without Chab Dai, there is no way we would be
capable of reaching so many
children.
On a personal note, in my own journey to build a Cambodian
child protection charity that truly
helps the children and families first, some of the key lessons I've
learned have been from Chab Dai. From the importance of building a team of
staff who respect and value children's rights, to understanding how child
safety and privacy matters when fundraising - it's easy to exploit the vulnerable
children's stories for funding but we would lose their trust in us. I've also
found the value of gauging the real needs of the community through first-hand
research and using Chab Dai's wonderful in-house library of resources before
rolling out a programme.
And even more personally: when we first met, I hadn't been to
church since I was a child. Part
of my disillusionment was from the message that Christian
organisations cared more about converting than helping, and children going
hungry on the streets outside big brand-new church buildings in Cambodia didn't
help. But Helen and two other missionaries I met in Cambodia - women who worked
in the field building up communities and showing love and true charity to
everyone, not just the people who went to their church - spoke to me more
loudly than any sermon could.”
Dale Edmonds
*Photographs used with the permission of Riverkids.
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