We help families bring
their children home in Sri Lanka
We work with international donors, governments and communities, and encourage them to redirect funds from orphanages to provide health, education and social services in the community, so more children can be raised in loving families. We train professionals to deliver better care and support. We transform social care systems to find ways to stop unnecessary child abandonment. We help families to bring their children home.
OUR APPROACH
Our aim is to improve opportunities for children by helping to keep poor families together and ensure their education. Reunite children abandoned through poverty with their own or foster families and meanwhile help raise standards in children's institutions.
All of our programmes are centred around three core pillars
Providing Education, Transforming institutions and Bringing and Keeping Families together.
TRANSFORMING INSTITUTIONS
Collaborating with global partners we provide training to National Childcare services, the judiciary, law students, universities, civil society organizations, NGO's, local communities, faith groups and parents to end institutionalization and offer family care alternatives.
In the meantime, we improve care and conditions by employing and training housemothers in hygiene, health, nutrition and how to better stimulate the children, for more successful reintegration into families and society. We also provide disabled children with physio and speech therapy and supply sports equipment, arrange activity days, vocational training and employment opportunities for older institutionalized children while we work towards finding them a family.
BRINGING AND
KEEPING FAMILIES TOGETHER
We assess children in the orphanage, identify those that have potential family relationships. Work with the government to seek out the parent or relative to assess their health, living situation, work status and support system. Where safe and possible we assist the family with re-adoption through the courts, establish the children in local schools, and provide housing and support until the reunited family can reach self-sufficiency and independence.
When the child cannot be reunited with their family, we work with social workers to find possible foster families.
PROVIDING EDUCATION
We recognize that in poverty-stricken areas education becomes a luxury, not a basic right. To date, TFT has ensured that more than 16,000 children from both the institutions and the local community have access to education and vocational training by providing them with the often unaffordable uniforms; books; bags; pens and pencils. TFT International Preschool offers quality education to up to 85 children and parents are learning from their children's books, as well as English, child protection and sustainability. It also provides parents with a place to learn about health, hygiene, sustainability and is a safe place to leave their children while they work.