Education is our children's doorway to the world...the hinge upon which their futures rest and their lives depend. The future of a child without education in Thailand is impoverished and subject to prostitution, slave labor and human trafficking. One key project, Kid Launch, is a Thailand-based program supported by the Genesis Network, providing community education and outreach in support of children that may not otherwise have access to schooling. Genesis works with communities that are proactive and highly involved in each project - the end result being that they assume control and remain committed to a self-sustained effort.
For example, we are now working to provide more than 400 children with access to elementary schooling (K-3) for six villages within the Mae Cheam district by December 2009. Genesis’s ultimate goal is to become irrelevant - to arrive at a time and place where its services are no longer needed. Communities have sought out our help rather than that of many larger domestic non-governmental or international NGO operations. The advantage of Genesis projects rests with their 360- degree developmental and humanistic approach. We sleep in the village, we eat with the villagers - what we create is a family. It is our belief that we treat each and every person as family - and the children as our own.
THE DEMAND: Each project targets impoverished or otherwise at-risk children. Taking the Kid Launch project’s area of operation as an example, an estimated 900,000 of the Thailand's primary school-aged children do not attend school or start several years too late. The resultant poverty too often makes the fulfillment of child rights near impossible. Along the fringes of poverty exists a lack of social support and scarce socioeconomic opportunity. It is a place in which these children are most at risk and likely to be swept into abusive sectors of work shielded from wage regulations and safety conditions. It is ultimately where they are most likely to fall into slave-labor and exploitation.
LEADERSHIP AND SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT: The programs are gauged as much toward developing and sustaining an effective education program as it is toward building and enriching the environment that surround it. We see learning as a lifestyle rather than a task to be completed. Genesis projects breach the confines of the classroom to build an active community atmosphere facilitating social collaboration, a mutual sense of responsibility among its members, and overall group cohesion.
FULFILLMENT: Genesis projects have established critical relationships with district and village leaders of the areas in which it is working. On-the-ground staff coordinates with local organizations and support groups to create a collaborative effort sustainable into the long term.
ALL THAT WE NEED TO CONTINUE THIS SUCCESS...TO BRING TANGIBLE HOPE TO THESE CHILDREN...IS YOU!!