Dear Wonderful Supporter,

Happy Songkran Festival! (The Traditional Thai New Year)

The purpose of this newsletter is to update subscribers on our Claim Your Rights Program. To date, we have raised a mere $310, far from our goal of $26,000 for the year. The Foundation would like to ask for your support of this program. Three hundred and ten dollars will only run only 2 workshops for 80 girls, while more than 1,000 girls still critically lack awareness regarding the matters covered in the workshops. Our goal is to train 5,000 underprivileged girls this year alone. You can help bring us closer to this goal and make a real difference in the lives of these young women by donating now!

In our Claim Your Rights workshops, we provide them with the information and skills they need to recognize and report crimes against them, avoid dangerous situations, and respond sensibly in times of threat. The workshop also covers the following:

• Awareness of and Prevention of Danger: Raising awareness of a range of risks (including relationships, harassment, financial dependency, pregnancy, and online grooming), as well as teaching tactics for avoiding dangers and ways to deal with incidents that may arise.
• Basic Self-Defense: Training in basic moves, such as wrist grabs, lapel grabs, and protection on the ground.
• Women’s Laws and Rights: Raising awareness of the laws relevant to women, such as procedure in reporting domestic violence or assault to the police. We also provide resources and further support when it is needed.

Last year our workshops reached over 2,958 girls from Ubon Ratchathani and its surrounding provinces. If you are looking to make an impact on the lives of others this year, we ask that you please keep us in mind. If you haven't donated yet but have been thinking of supporting impactful work, donate now! We hope to have raised enough money to run more workshops by the time schools reopen following the summer holiday.

With Gratitude,

Sarochinee

Dear friends and supporters,

This will be our last update on the project as it we have completed all the milestones we set out to achieve. Do join our mailing list to stay in touch.

We like to also draw your attention to an article written by Ruth Carr, who spent a full day with us in the province to gather information about our training workshop. You can read it here: https://www.newsdeeply.com We hope you'll enjoy reading the article.

Over the duration of the project, you helped us raise over $106,052 – that’s an amazing outcome. Thank you again! To recap, we set up this project in response to a very clear need: 

• A common solution often proposed to the poverty faced in rural villages across Thailand is to send their children to the city to make money to send home.
• While the poverty is challenging enough, the male-oriented culture has created an even more unfortunate fate for the women. Often, it is the young female who rescues her family, while men tend to be freer to live their lives.
• There is always at least one person in every family, who knows intuitively from an early age that she will become responsible for improving the whole family’s life, while the rest of the family lives from her earnings.
• Inevitably, she will end up in Bangkok, with the weight of her family's expectations upon her - but without the skills to secure anything other than the low paid and dangerous jobs, which no one else will take.
• We work with these young girls before they move to the city, and then direct them to our courses aimed at women in Bangkok if and when they migrate.

That need still remains. But, since we began, our training for disadvantaged girls in rural Thailand has moved from strength to strength. We are in a better position than ever to meet the needs of these girls.

• We reach thousands of girls each year with life-saving guidance, inspiration, real-life advice from people who have been there, kindness and support.
• We adapt our programs regularly to meet the changing needs of our target group.
• As a result, we are beginning to tackle difficult issues such as self-esteem, social media and instant messaging, as well as our usual topics of career development, self-defense, and moving to the city.
• In just the last few months, we have also launched a version of our innovative new training course, Better Me, for girls in the area.

We will keep working on our mission every day, because there are thousands more girls to reach across the region. We hope you will continue to join us on our journey. Please visit our new project to make a donation.

If not, please consider joining our mailing list, so that you can stay in touch with us once we have closed this campaign down: http://pratthanadee.org/join-the-mailing-list/

Team Pratthanadee

Dear Supporters,

We hope you had a wonderful holiday season and wish you all things good in the new year.

As 2017 begins, we would like your support for the Claim Your Rights Program. To date, we have only raised $80, a far cry from the $26,000 goal we have set for ourselves this year. Eighty dollars will only get us as far as printing the materials needed to run a workshop for 50 girls. Our aim is to train 5,000 underprivileged girls this year. You can get us closer to that goal of changing the lives of these young women by donating now!

At Pratthandee Foundation, our goal is to provide free and high quality training to underprivileged girls in Ubon Ratchathani. Since 2011, our workshops have impacted over 5,000 girls from Ubon Ratchathani, one of the poorest provinces in Thailand.

The ‘Claim Your Rights Program’ equips girls with the life-saving skills they need to protect themselves and covers the following:

• Awareness of and Prevention of Danger: Raise awareness of a range of risks (including relationships, harassment, financial dependency, pregnancy and online grooming), tactics for avoiding the dangers and ways to deal with any incidents.
• Basic Self-Defense: Training in basic moves, such as wrist grabs, lapel grabs, and protection on the ground.
• Women’s Law and Rights: Raise awareness of the laws relevant to women, such as reporting domestic violence or assault to the police, and provide resources they need if they are unsure.

The Program is designed to be engaging with lots of games, multimedia resources and role playing. Not surprising, the feedback has been encouraging. In a recent series of workshops sponsored by the Australian Embassy in Thailand, the outcome was very positive.

• 94% highly agreed with the statement: “You can apply this knowledge to your daily life."
• 94% highly agreed with the statement: “This workshop was interesting.”
• 93% highly agreed with the statement: “The trainer gave good explanations and content during training.”

We also received the following accolades from the participants:

• “I want you to run this training again.”
• “I like it very much. Now I can protect myself from risky situations.”
• “This activity gave us a lot of useful knowledge. Thank you Pratthanadee Foundation for providing this information that helps us become more aware of the risks.”
• “I want you to come here often. This is so much fun and I want to learn more about self defense.”

So if you are looking at making an impact on the lives of others this year, keep us in mind. If you haven't donated yet and have been thinking of supporting impactful work, please donate now!

With gratitude,

Sarochinee Unyawachsomrith (Beer)