Hello lovely donors! Thank you for supporting our very first project "Trafficking Prevention and Foster Care in Thailand"! We have reached $9000 and have grown a lot since we first start Jojo's Sanctuary. Our trafficking prevention program is going strong and is self-sustaining now, so we don't need support in that area anymore. We are closing this project in order to create a new project focusing on the specific area of emergency foster care support. Thank you so much for donating to make this project a success. You can continue to follow the journey of Jojo's Sanctuary on our website www.jojosthailand.org or our social media pages. We would love if you would consider donating to our new project as well. And if you would like to receive our newsletter, please email me at heather@jojosthailand.org
We so appreciate all of your support!
Sincerely,
Heather and the team at Jojo's Sanctuary
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Our trafficking prevention program is still going strong. We have started working with a large children's home to equip their staff to train the children on these issues. We recently were lucky enough to have Healing Arts Peace Project come provide a training on Trauma Informed Care to the staff from government children's homes and private homes alike, which was wonderful. We even had the opportunity to go to a mountain village and teach the children there about protecting themselves from sexual abuse and how to report if they or a friend ever experiences it. The kids favorite part of this day was getting to have their faces painted like their favorite superhero. It's a reminder that we don't need superpowers to be a superhero, we just need to protect and support each other.
On the foster care front, we have been meeting regularly with the staff from the emergency shelter and the government orphanage and they will begin sending children who are about to transition into either adoptive families or back to their biological families to stay with our team for a month or two. This will allow the children who will stay in Thailand to adjust to life in a small family home rather than being one of many children in a large orphanage and transition with Thai people. In addition, for children who will be adopted overseas, this will give them an opportunity to stay with Westerners and learn to eat western food and speak English regularly. This will make their adjustment period to a new country go more smoothly for them and the adoptive families.
Since the government still doesn't have a support budget for children in short term or transitional foster care, we are most likely going to close this particular funding page soon and create two separate ones: one for foster care to help support the Thai families providing interim care to children and one to continue providing training to those working with at risk children to provide them the skills to prevent children from being victimized and exploited.
Exciting news from our translator in Bangkok! She has finally finished the first draft of the Thai translation for The Well-Armored Child, a book for parents about how to protect your children from sexual abuse. Now we will print some sample copies and ask various lawyers, social workers and counselors to double check them for accuracy and to make sure they are accessible to Thai people of all reading abilities. We hope for a finalized copy by the end of 2019 and ready for distribution by early 2020.
Trafficking Prevention Workshops:
Butsaba and Jay will be traveling to Hua Hin next week to teach the families of Abundant Life Center about positive parenting and internet safety for their children.
We had the chance to distribute 50 Days for Girls kits to girls in a remote village near Doi Inthanon, about 3 hours from Chiang Mai city and when the new school term starts in May, we will do the educational portion and distribution for other girls at the nearby boarding school that serves villages from all over the mountain.
Next month, we will be training the staff of Remember Nhu's Chiang Mai children's home in our suite of trafficking prevention workshops.
We hope you have all had a good end of 2018. Once again, thank you for your support for this project. We are excited about the work ahead of us in 2019. We will continue partnering with Care for Children and are looking forward to putting a new plan in motion to raise awareness about foster care and get more families registered. In March, we will be taking part in a national conference about the continued development of the foster system and in October, we will attend the International World Without Orphans conference right here in Bangkok. We are also excited about a collaborating with the emergency shelter to provide short term housing for children in crisis, which was one of our goals when we first started Jojo's Sanctuary.
Our Child and Family Empowerment Program is continuing on and we will be teaching these workshops to a new set of Thai staff workers at various children's homes around Chiang Mai, with the help of Prosperous Youth Foundation. We also plan to take a couple of trips to remote villages for Days for Girls sanitary kit distributions and begin teaching the Days for Girls male counterpart entitled Men Who Know. We are very excited that in March we will be holiding a week long translation session to get the Days for Girls flip chart materials translated into the main 8 tribal languages of this region. We anticipate the distribution of kits to rapidly increase after this training and the more girls and women will have their lives changed because of it. Thanks to Days for Girls' Louise for sponsoring the travel and housing costs for the attendees, some of whom will come hours by bus to attend. We will continue to work with student dorms in the Mae Jam region to provide training in Positive Parenting skills and also teach them how to run the Child and Family Empowerment Program. Finally, we will be working with Rapha House Chiang Mai to train their staff in Positive Parenting strategies while HUG Project will provide training in trauma informed care.
All in all, it looks to be a great year. Thank you for partnering with us in this journey. If you would like to give another gift, we would very much appreciate it to continue this work. Please also follow us on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook to stay up to date with the latest happenings.
Hello wonderful donors!
Thank you again for supporting our project to provide training for foster carers and trafficking prevention workshops to vulnerable children and staff who care for them. We are so excited to be coming to the end of such a successful year. Look what you helped us accomplish in 2018:
We would love to continue this project for another year, with your help! On November 27, 2018, GlobalGiving will be doing a massive amount of matching donations, so your donation on that day will be worth double!
We also have a new project you can give to that helps fund citizenship applications for stateless children who were born in Thailand but whose parents don't know how to navigate the system to get their kids citizenship rights. To donate to that project, search for Project #34579.
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