Loving families for orphans in Thailand

As you may know, Care for Children has been delivering training to Thailand’s ‘Shelters for children and families’. These emergency shelters are often the first point of contact for children when they enter the care system and provide a vital service for children in moments when they're desperate for support

Having already trained six shelters in foster care, as part of an initial pilot, this project aimed to deliver training to the remaining 71 shelters, giving them the knowledge and skills required to set-up and run their own foster care programmes. This would mean that, rather than moving them into a more permanent orphanage, the shelter could refer the children for foster care directly.

Between February and October 2021, the Care for Children team delivered 30 workshops over 83 days. With restrictions reintroduced at the start of the year due to an increase in COVID-19 cases in Thailand, this training took place via Zoom. 

In response to the pandemic, and specifically its impact on children, the government invited Care for Children to deliver additional training to the shelters. This training, which took place in August, aimed to build the capacity of the shelters in providing emergency support to children who had lost their primary caregivers due to the pandemic, whether it be kinship care or foster care.

Here are some quotes from the trainees:

• “The case studies that were used in the training really helped me to understand the material and I now have a clear picture of what we should do.”

• “I love that you break us into groups and we have to work on a case that you have created for us.  It is a great way to learn.”

• “The training has helped me to understand the process of preparing children, preparing the foster family and the community. I have a much clearer picture now and I’m going to put it into practice.”

• “If the practitioners understand all that we have been taught today it will really reduce the amount of time that children need to spend in an emergency shelter.”

• “Today’s topic of understanding trauma will really help us to understand children more because every child that comes through has experienced trauma in one form or another. The training was really easy to understand and will be really useful.

• "This has really helped me learn and understand the role of foster parents and the importance of the relationship between children and their birth parents too."

The shelters can now place children directly into foster care, rather than moving them into orphanages prior to being referred for foster care. The shelters are now able to recruit potential foster parents and will be part of a team that will assess applicants for their suitability to be foster parents. 

During 2021, and particularly the third COVID wave, thirteen shelters were able to assess families for their suitability to foster and 76 families are now fostering 83 children. This was extremely positive as it meant that children who had been impacted by COVID were able to be supported to remain with relatives rather than have to go to an orphanage. While the bulk of the 76 families were kin or people known to the children in need, the shelter staff had to follow the process and procedures taught to them during the training and outlined in the ‘Operations Manual for Foster Care’. It is the shelters who are responsible for the support and monitoring of the foster families.

This pandemic reminds us all that children are far better off in safe, secure and loving family environments. 

Thank you for your support and staying connected to our work.

Your support has ensured we can continue delivering specialised training and support to orphanages across Thailand. This means children can be moved out of orphanages and placed into local, loving foster families.

The pandemic continues to present challenges to our projects. However we have been encouraged to hear that the Thai government has been promoting emergency foster care placements for children who have been impacted via COVID, and our team has been asked to advise them on this. 

The Shelters for Children and Families, which are located right across the country, will be at the forefront of this provision. Care for Children is in the process of training all 77 shelters in foster care. Training started at the beginning of the year and will finish this December.

Instead of referring children who have lost parents due to the pandemic to orphanages, the shelters will place these children into local, loving foster families. For those children whose parents have COVID and are too unwell to care for them, the shelters will organise temporary care for them, through family members or foster families in the community.

We're also excited to see the Thai government launch its new promotional materials to raise awareness of foster care, including information on how to apply to become foster parents! This is key to reducing stigma towards taking care of a child with whom there is no blood relationships. We’re hoping the distribution of these materials will lead to a significant increase in the number of applying to become foster parents.

This pandemic reminds us all that children are far better off in safe, secure and loving family environments. 

Thank you for your support and staying connected to our work.

Thailand’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been swift and determined, resulting in a relatively a small number of cases and deaths. From April to December, the daily rate of new COVID infections was usually less than ten cases a day. Before the start of the New Year break, we drew up plans for 2021, which included delivering training workshops to the 77 ‘shelters for children and families’ across the country, over 31 weeks of the year.

There shelters are often the first point of contact for children when they enter the care system and provide a vital service for children in moments when they're desperate for support. If the shelter is unable to send the child back home to their family or find relatives to care for the child, it is very likely that the child will be sent to a government orphanage where they may remain for a long period of time. Therefore, our goal is train them in foster care, so that they can place children into safe, stable, and nurturing family environments, rather than into long-term insttitonal care.

In order to complete this training, we divided the 71 provinces into eight regions and the team had planned on being on the road a lot! However after a spike in infections in December, we had to rethink our plans. Virtual training seems to be the answer. While many of us can take pride that we acquired some Zoom skills in 2020, not everyone has done so, so training via Zoom seems rather daunting. We are hugely grateful for all the tutorials on YouTube and with lots of trial and error we are trying to learn how we might pull this off.

Our head trainer, Poy, reached out to some of the people from the Shelters who had been part of our training last year, to be our ‘Zoom training guinea pigs’. We all joined online for a Foster Care Zoom Training Masterclass! It was a fun hour and needless to say there were lots of echoes of “you’re on mute” and “I can’t find the chat box”.

We are now preparing to start virtual training this month. We are hoping that by July we can resume in-person training, if the situation permits. 

This epidemic has affirmed that children are better off in families, rather than in orphanages. If you would consider supporting us again in the future, we would be extremely appreciative. Thank you for staying connected to our work.

Thailand’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been swift and determined, resulting in a relatively a small number of cases and deaths. With lockdown and hygiene rules being implemented, the spread of the virus has been limited. Due to the minimal physical contact in Thai culture (e.g. the Wai as greeting, rather than a handshake or hug) and the fact that wearing masks is not unusual, the public’s response has been almost natural. We are pleased to announce that our training is now taking place again, although with stringent safety procedures in place.

In July, Care for Children’s Thai training team started delivering training to six emergency shelters, giving them the knowledge and skills required to set-up and run their own foster care programme. 

These shelters are often the government’s first point of contact for children when they enter the care system and provide a vital service for children in moments when they're desperate for support. The shelters have no training or experience in foster care. Therefore, if the shelter is unable to send the child back home to their family or find relatives to care for the child, the child is automatically sent to the nearest government orphanage. In addition to being detrimental to their health and well-being, when transferred to an orphanage, children are often moved far away from their home province, in the process severing ties with their family, local culture, dialect and community.

Consequently, we have developed this new project working with Thailand’s emergency shelters. So far this year, the team have delivered nine workshops to six shelters. These shelters will lead the way, serving as inspiration and a blueprint for all other shelters across Thailand as the training is rolled out nationwide in 2021.

This epidemic has affirmed that children are better off in families, rather than in orphanages. If you would consider supporting us again in the future, we would be extremely appreciative. Thank you for staying connected to our work.