Educating 120 street-working children in Cambodia

We at Lotus Kids Club make a concerted effort to collaborate with other NGOs as well as community organizations and businesses.  Collaboration with other organizations takes a process that requires much thought, communication and planning. During my time helping an organization in the U.S., I experienced a lot of efforts from both sides in the collaboration process and many factors that need to be considered.  

What are the benefits?  How much time and effort will it take?  Do our philosophies and goals match for a collaboration?  Roles and responsibilities need to be decided.  What if conflicts or disagreements arise?  

There are many positives with a collaboration.  There are advantages of getting different perspectives, a few are: a chance to gain more skills and resources, encouraged creativity, and a possible result of monetary savings.  It can be challenging though to be truthful I think it has been much easier here in Siem Reap, Cambodia.  Perhaps because here there are more shared goals already recognized and there are few government services to take advantage of.  Therefore there is more of an incentive to form collaborations. 

Our most recent collaborative success resulted in LKC receiving half the bikes we need for the graduates of our PS/K Program from another NGO.  We worked with NGO in sharing visits, ideas, and our Nurse and LKC provides our donated multi-vitamins to the NGO.  We didn’t really expect anything in return for the vitamins donated but we’re thrilled when they offered to give us the bikes. 

I realize as I write this we’ve had many collaborations, too many to go into detail, so I will just mention two of our best endeavors.  Our collaboration with an NGO that works with special needs children has been a continuous relationship .  We've had the advantage to learn from their Western trained, experienced Nurse to supervise our young Nurses.  We have shared the donated multi-vitamins we received with them.  LKC have accepted 2 children with down syndrome into our PS/K Program referred by them.  They in turn taught our teachers sign language to better communicate with the children. 

Another NGO with a free medical clinic would accept our parents as patients as well as our staff though our families were not in the clinic’s target area.  In return we provided early childhood education workshops to their teaching staff.

The sharing of resources and skills is a win win situation and is a testament that collaborations does work.  We will continue these efforts and continually seek out new collaborations.