Online database for 100 Thai Children's Homes

Dear Partners, 

As we had hoped, this really is an All Good News report. We have made tangible progress by providing training to two homes so far and several demos. In addition, we were invited to speak at the Chiang Mai Children's Homes Assoication which represents 60 children's homes in the province. We had 12 homes signup as interested in learning more. We also had a Q&A time that was very enlightening and revealed that money (as in subscription fees for the online service) will be the primary issue for adoption. Because of your donations, we are not currently charging for the new online service but we intend to (we realy will need to) in the future. We are considering different models and will continue to get feedback from the homes, but we hope by raising more funding, we can offset some of the costs especially to those smaller homes that will really need it. 

The other thing we have learned first hand as we have tried to onboard the new homes, is that each one is unique and doing multiple types of programs. One of the latest homes actually has 5 different programs including residential care, a foster program, community support, and university scholarships. Our app is mainly focused on residential care but we have started designing some new features for the community support model. This home has 150 families receiving support to help their children attend and stay in school. The families apply on a month-to-month basis where they get support based on financial need each month. Since the process of gathering the information and making viability decisions is very different from residential care, we don't support this yet but will start working on it. Many more children can be helped to stay in school and stay with their families than can be taken into a home without their family. We want to encourage this type of program by the children's homes and support it with our app so that only a few staff can handle a lot of children when equipped with the right IT. 

We have more demos ongoing and expect to train one new home each month. We provide full service support and seek to learn how the app can be configured to help each home with their unique needs. Our goal is not just to provide software but to ensure the homes have the tools they need to grow their capacity to serve the children well and that they can use the tools well. 

After many months of delays and struggles, this is the good news we have been waiting to share. We are so grateful for your gifts that have made it possible to for new homes to get up and running more quickly. If you are able to give a monthly gift of $100 or more, we will use it to provide scholarships to the most needy homes so they will also get the help they need.