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)

Dear friends and supporters, 

Over the length of this project, you have helped us raise over $105,000 – that’s an amazing result. Thank you! Soon, we will be marking this project as complete and closing down the page, so please don't forget to join our mailing list to stay in touch.  

We set up this project in response to a very clear need:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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. 
5. 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 Ubon Ratchathani 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.

Before we go, we wanted to share with you one last video. All this time you have been supporting our work in Ubon, you have been supporting Nang, our Ubon Office Manager, and her daily activities – going into schools in poor and rural areas and running vital training for girls.

Nang started off as a student with us in Bangkok herself – and she completely turned her life around. From teenage pregnancy, to sex work, to leading empowerment workshops for young girls today – her story is an incredible one.

You can watch Nang’s video here: http://pratthanadee.org/nang/

Thank you so much for your kindness and support. Please feel free to reach out to us directly if you would like to become more involved (staff@pratthanadee.org). We’d love to hear from you.

Finally, from all the team in Thailand, we’d like to wish you very happy holidays and a healthy and successful New Year,

The Pratthanadee Team

Ps. Since you helped us reach our goal, we have set ourselves a new one! If you would like to help us reach even more girls, please visit our new project to make a donation. We would be delighted to have your continued support.

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/

Links:

• Check out our new website
• Like us on Facebook for loads of pictures

Hello everyone, 

Last month our Ubon Ratchathani branch celebrated its 5th anniversary! Thank you all so much for your support so far. We have achieved so much, but there is still much more to do. Please follow the link here to see our report from Ubon, produced especially for our anniversary. 

Claim Your Rights is one of two key training workshops we offer in schools. You can read more about the workshop here. We run pre and post-training tests and collect evaluation surveys from the girls who take this workshop, to try and measure our success in training. We want to share with you some of our findings from this assessment.

We often find a serious lack of understanding of the law and criminal behavior. For example, before training over 50% of girls did not think that domestic violence was a crime. After training, this was reduced to less than 35%.

However, there is some way to go. In training, we found a concerning belief among girls that a crime could not be committed by a friend or relative (over 80% believed this to be not possible), nearly 90% believed that they shouldn’t tell their parents if they experience crime because it is a bother to them, and 83% believed that crimes only included bodily harm.

Fortunately, although this is a serious topic, we are able to run the training with games, role-play and videos so that it is engaging for the students. We received the following feedback:

• 99% highly agreed with the statement: “You have more knowledge and understand more about the dangers in your life after this workshop”.
• 96% highly agreed with the statement: “You now understand more about your rights and the law and how to use this information if violence or crime occurs”.
• 97% highly agreed with the statement: “You have new self-defense skills that you can use if you face danger in your life.”
• 94% highly agreed with the statement: “You can apply this knowledge to your daily life”.
• 84% highly agreed with the statement: “You can share this information with friends and family”.

Comments on the forms included (translated from Thai):

• "I want you to run this training again.”
• "So happy to see you. Please come back.”
• “I like it very much. Now I can protect myself from risk.”
• "Want to have it again, but all day not just a half day."
• "Would like to know more about how to look after myself and want to join an activity like this again.”
• “I want you to do activity every year or one time per year because I know better and understand how to protect myself."
• “So much fun and learn so many things from the trainer. Trainers so nice and happy.”
• “This activity gave us a lot of knowledge. Thank you Pratthanadee Foundation for providing this knowledge and make us understand about the risk.”

The feedback from students is positive, but we are committed to continually improving our impact. We want to share some of our reflections on this approach to training with you:

Poy (Program Coordinator)

"Claim Your Rights brings together the issues that women in today’s world are forced to face, covering threats, rights, and self-defense. Most people think that this has nothing to do with them at the start. However, when the subject is linked with real life, the participants became aware that it is not that distant from them and could have a big impact on their life."

Nang (Program Coordinator - Ubon)

"Claim Your Rights is new for the school and community. No other organization has done the activity in this way before. Students are interested in the activity, enjoy it and really get involved in the workshop.

"The content of the workshop and the way we try to relate it to their daily life really helps them to understand the complicated information we are trying to provide. Some of the schools have high risk students attending. Our workshop is able to already help them with current issues in their life."

We want to say thank you very much for your support, which makes this training possible.

From all the team at the Pratthanadee Foundation (formerly the Goodwill Group Foundation). 

PS. Please note that this is our last report under our old name. We are reaching the end of our transition period and will soon fully change our name to the Pratthanadee Foundation. Read more here. 

Links:

• Visit our Website
• Like us on Facebook for more photos