Empowering Families Project
Justification
The overall goal is to work with the poorest and the most vulnerable community members, empowering them to live in dignity in communities that are inclusive and adequately resourced with support in four key sectors: social inclusion, health, livelihoods, and education/children. It also aims to develop an effective mode of empowering with the most marginalized households that can be shared, replicated and scaled-up.
The specific objective of family empowerment program is to empower the poorest and the most vulnerable families, especially people with disabilities and ethnic minority groups, to live in dignity and privilege in communities.
Objectives
- Poorest families and vulnerable groups have confidence, unity, respect, harmony and collaboration with their families and communities.
- Poorest families and vulnerable groups have access to health services and have knowledge of good health practices.
- Poorest families and vulnerable groups have increased income through sustainable and diverse income sources sufficient to meet their basic needs.
- Children, especially those from poorest families and vulnerable groups, have access to quality education and development services.
- An effective model of working with the poorest families and vulnerable groups is established, enabling replication and scale-up of implementation.
Working Approaches:
The Empowering Families Model: working with the poorest and most vulnerable. This section presents the Empowering Families project’s processes and practices, which together aimed at forming a comprehensive model for working with the poorest and most vulnerable community members.
Figure 2 below represents the Empowering Families process, showing two key elements of the model:
1. Twin pathway approach: the project included strategies for working directly with the poorest and most marginalized families, as well as with whole communities and their leaders and institutions.
2. multi-sectoral approach: in both the family and community pathways, the project worked in multiple sectors – social inclusion, health, education/parenting, and livelihoods.
Parenting with the poorest families
Parenting is one of the key activities supporting Early Childhood Care and Development and Child Rights Promotion. Therefore, KrY has paid high attention on this work since its inception so that we can contribute to the child development (which is our core work).
The main objective of this work is to strengthen the parents’ capacity in taking care their children (esp. children age 0-6) so that they (children) are healthy and live in a clean and safe environment enabling for their growth and their holistic development. This key activity is mainly to organize a monthly parents group discussion/meeting, facilitated by animators (recruited and trained by KrY) and focusing on 8 key topics1. This parent group discussion/meeting also gives chance for those parents to meet and share each other the good experiences in taking care their children and in solving problems they are facing. This has contributed to positively change in the parenting skill practices of these parents and build a habit of helping each other within their community.