Children in Families
Children in Families is a local Cambodian NGO, dedicated to providing high-quality family-based care for orphans and vulnerable children in Cambodia.
Vision
Families and communities in Cambodia empowered to provide children with a safe and healthy childhood, enabling them to become healthy, positive adult members of their families and communities themselves.
Mission
Equipping and strengthening families and communities to provide a nurturing environment for children, through family-based care, community development and educational support.
What Children in Families is Doing
- Emergency Care: a safe place to stay immediately.
- Kinship Care: supporting children to remain in their extended families and communities of origin.
- Foster Care: supporting the placement of children in foster families for the longer term.
- ABLE: supporting children with disabilities to grow up in families
- Domestic Adoption: the last step ensuring that children have a family to belong to.
- Church Partnerships program: village–level child protection training
- Outreach: Assisting orphanages with reintegration
- Rok Kern: helping westerners move from being voluntourists to family-based care advocates
- OSCaR (Open Source Case-management and Record-Keeping) System is a web-based system that enables accurate information gathering and customizable program modelling in a central hub. Child development and program outcomes can monitored easily and reliably, making social work practices, data collection and data analysis simpler and more reliable.
Action with Family Care First (FCF)
Children in Families is working to expand the capacity of Cambodian communities to provide safe and effective family-based care and reintegration services to Cambodian children. They do this by providing case-managed kinship and foster support services to over 40 children (a number that is still growing) in the Kandal area.
In addition to care for children, these services contribute to system expansion, and provide valuable lessons-learned at the NGO, national and subnational government levels.
OSCaR has already achieved a great deal of buy-in within the Family Care First network and beyond. This online case management system has allowed more than 30 organizations to transfer, from the traditional paper-based record keeping, to online. In addition, OSCaR is supportive of the Cambodian government’s goals for internal development, at both training and software-development levels. Software integration of the 6 new case management forms is ongoing, and there will be significant training needs around support of MOSVY and DOSVY staff as they begin using the system. It should also be noted there has been excellent coordination with UNICEF, with Open Institute and with MoSVY, to ensure that the RCI mapping tool and database can work together as one system. These technical conversations are ongoing.