Child Protection Thailand Project #31363

Loving families for orphans in Thailand

by Care for Children

Project Report | Jun 7, 2021
Rising to the 'COVID' challenge

By James Paul | Senior Grant Writer

Care for Children’s country project teams have had to think on their toes over the last 18 months, rearranging their calendars, changing training programmes, and adapting to a more online approach to their work. There are internet hic-cups here and there but for the most part the training has gone ahead according to our original schedule.

As we continue to develop our digitalisation tools and strategy (which we started before COVID!), for our new vision for ‘a world of children in families’, we have also found it a useful insight into how online training could be managed. Here are a few reflections from the past 18 months:

Relationships are still our priority

Online training is making it possible to not only do the training, but also continue and even build relationships with the participants, even though we are not able to meet together in person. We can see that everyone is getting much more adept with their on-line training skills too!

Extra effort on both sides

One day the internet went down during a training session. Our training team had to request that the training be postponed that day, and were delighted when all the participants were willing to change their own schedules so we could fit the training in on another day.

Making it fun

Participants have expressed that they enjoy the training and our novel training atmosphere. Lots of fun tools, such as apps, that are used to make the training engaging and keep interest high. We have quizzes and competitions throughout the training and at the end of training week those who have earned prizes can expect to get a little surprise in the mail!

Keeping it real

Case studies are used so that the participants can see how the theory of running foster care is carried out in practice. For example, participants use these case studies to plan how they would run a foster care program. It is a great way to practice all the intricacies of doing recruitment, assessment, care planning, child and family preparation, follow-up and contact with birth families. We get lots of positive feedback from the participants and comments about how much they enjoy working with the case studies. They use the same case throughout each process, and it’s common to receive feedback from participants commenting that they almost feel like they personally know the child and family by the end of the training.

Staying creative

In one case in the Thai project, the training team were surprised and delighted to see how well the participants did at creating an on-line life story book. When they do this activity in person they can sit and cut out photos and draw, but since working online they have to use a different set of tools and skills – and the results were very impressive.

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

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Feb 9, 2021
Acquiring Zoom skills

By Jane Arnott | Thailand Country Manager

Our head trainer, Poy, on Zoom

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.

A practice Zoom training session

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Oct 16, 2020
Training Thailand's emergency shelters

By James Paul | Senior Grant Writer

Training in progress

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.

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