Core Competency: job skills for rural Thai youth

We're well into June. With the start of the rainy season, the weather has started to cool down enough for students to sit through their classes.   

The "Upskills" classes started earlier this year with shopkeepers in the town of Phrao and the adult education centers are restarting.

The middle and high school students at Warm Heart and a small hill-tribe boarding school across town are engaged in practicing their English while exploring ways to develop their emotional intelligence, initially focusing on self-awareness and social skills.

We're delighted to have volunteers from the UK, Canada, and India to assist with the classes in addition to their projects in the community.

• Shopkeepers With the start of the new school year in mid-May and early June, schedules are gradually settling down, allowing our group of shopkeepers to allocate time to improving their customer service skills while practicing English. Finn brings his experience in restaurant management and hospitality to the conversations and the role-plays he uses to teach the classes. As the COVID restrictions ended shopkeepers have been having many more visitors, often foreigners, coming through their shops in Phrao. Everyone delights in a smile returned by a customer.

• Young Adult Education Students tend to be younger, many recently out of 9th grade or coming back to school after a few years working.  They enjoy conversations engaging their social skills and brushing off their rusty elementary school English. They are learning practical skills while continuing to mature and find their path in life.

• Middle and High School Students Our Warm Heart students are stepping up to the anticipation and responsibilities of a new grade, with the majority in their teens. The older students have each been paired up with a younger student to act as a mentor.  They make sure their charges get their chores done and help the new students get settled in the children's home routines. The first workshops centered on awareness of the importance of the role of a mentor.  Next, they worked on dealing with bumps in the road - how to recognize and deal with emotions - their own and their mentees as they ran into resistance or issues that needed to be resolved.

• English Practice The workshops are designed to find fun ways to practice English while building these social and emotional intelligence capabilities.  Students are divided into groups according to age and grade to target the activities.

Looking ahead, the following plans have been scheduled for the upcoming months:

Adult Education Classes: The adult education classes will continue offering practical training in customer service skills and English language proficiency. These classes will be tailored to the needs and requirements of the participants, providing them with valuable skills for personal and professional growth.

Continued Practice for Students: Middle and high school students will continue their English practice and core competency skill development throughout the upcoming months. Additional activities, such as public speaking events, and community engagement projects, will be incorporated to further enhance their skills and confidence.

We continue to evaluate this program and adapt it to the needs identified by our community.  We will keep you posted as the groups progress.

Many thanks for investing in this program.

Dana, Michael, Evelind, and the Warm Heart team.

With the school year well underway, the Upskills program has been out in the community, engaging new audiences.  We now have weekly classes with a group of students at Informal Ed, where Finn is engaging our target audience of high school-level students. He has another class at the central agricultural cooperative offices, working with young professionals looking to improve their customer service skills to expand the reach of the cooperatives.  A group of shopkeepers is organizing a class, a result of the barista and mocktails workshops Finn ran in Phrao. 

The students at Informal Ed are ages 14 and up, most dropping out after 6th or 9th grade due to higher costs and family demands for income contribution. Most work during the day and attend evening classes to complete their high school equivalency.  

Finn continues to engage the children at Warm Heart, particularly the teenagers, in short programs to think about personal goals and any obstacles they see in their way.  With our younger children he has been making learning English fun, to capture their interest while they are still open to language acquisition.  For Children's Day in January, he ran English games at the Sub-district event for all the children from kindergarten through 9th grade.  The children had a great time, ranging from the alphabet to bingo with categories of words.

Thank you for sticking with us, as this program evolves. Finn is an engaging teacher and is succeeding with a wide range of students.  Your gift will go on giving as these students go out into the world with essential skills.

Best wishes for the months ahead!

Dana, Evelind, Michael and Finn

As the economy unfolds from COVID restrictions, the job market has opened up for entry-level service jobs.  This has resulted in our target population of rural high school-level youth moving out of our Phrao area for jobs.  At the same time, as the tourist industry starts to come back, the need for staff with strong customer service orientation grows.  We have been approached by the Phrao District leadership, including Public Health, to provide English and customer service skills training to a range of shopkeepers and health care staff.  

Over the last few months, we have been able to have Finn develop a series of programs for the Warm Heart children in self-esteem, presentation skills, and English.  He has been teaching English at workshops in Phrao using barista and cooking classes as the forum to attract new students.

He has plans for a series of short courses (3-5 sessions) to test out the program for the older students such as shopkeepers and restaurant workers.

Thank you for supporting the development of these livelihoods for our rural community.

Dana, Evelind, Michael and the ewarm Heart team.

After 6 months, we concluded the first cycle of our Upskilling Program. Finn worked hard together with 20 graduates from Phrao and many of them have gone out to the cities to look for jobs.

We checked in with a couple of our graduates to find out how they have been doing and are glad to hear that many of them have been putting the skills learned to good use!

If you have read our previous project report, we covered Faa, who graduated from our higher education sponsorship program. She had a one-year contract with one of the sub-district offices in Phrao and enrolled herself in this Upskilling Program. Now that she has completed both of them, she is currently a jack of all trades in Chiang Mai! She is working as a barista, digital marketing manager, and digital designer at a cafe, and doing part-time work as well.

Faa shared that the Upskilling Program has helped her to be more assertive and confident when communicating using English in her workplace. She also really misses all her classmates.

Nat is not a graduate of Warm Heart but heard of this program and joined us. She’s working for Charoen Pokphand Foods under the Management Trainee Program. Her greatest takeaway has been presentation skills as she has to present her team’s performance to her CEO every month. Some other things she has learned include public speaking and script creation.

Our first batch of participants have graduated from our program, and we are in a phase of restructuring and reaching out to new prospective students. Finn is also working on a marketing campaign to promote and increase awareness of this project.

We are excited to see how this program will develop and look forward to nurturing more young talents!

Thank you for your enduring support!

After a long wait (often 1-2 years), university students in Chiang Mai have been preparing for and attending their graduation ceremonies. The Thai university system requires a member of the royal family to distribute diplomas; with the death of the king a few years ago, and then COVID, most graduations have been on hold.  An interim diploma could be issued for job applications, but the official document comes with this ceremony.  Half our Upskills class are recent grads and they all spent the last month organizing and attending graduations

Finn has been working around the disruptions of schedule changes and building closures due to COVID spikes.  Despite these restrictions, The first cohort completed the first quarter of the program, focused on basic English,  The next section adds presentation and interviewing skills on top of the English.  This has lent itself to some one-on-one and smaller sessions that he set up to keep the momentum.

Faa is one of the recent graduates that you may know from our higher education sponsorship.  She graduated in the spring of 2020, into a COVID lockdown.  She worked at a local cafe until she landed a one-year contract with one of the Phrao sub-district offices.  One of the projects is an ongoing youth development program that sponsors an entrepreneurship program.  She helped attract our first class of students and has been improving her own skills in English and job interviews.  Her contract is up and she is using these new skills in her job search.

Looking forward, we are also in discussions with the District adult education, "Kosona", program to attract our next cohort of students.  Da and Finn met with them earlier this month.

Our high school girls and a couple of university students working online from WH have also been able to take advantage of the program.

We continue to be grateful for the computers that our high school students can share for online classes and Finn's energy working with all the children.

Thank you for investing in our youth and making this all possible!