WHAT IF YOU COULDN’T AFFORD TO KEEP YOUR KIDS?
Or what if your sister died and left you her 4 kids on top of your own 5 children?
This mother lives with her 7 children in this 10x12, two room shanty. She desperately wants her children to be better off than she is. She didn’t intentionally have all these children or act irresponsibly. It’s not her fault she can’t read. She simply cannot afford to feed them, let alone send them to school without help. Her pastor is helping every way he can. CFH-FPP is filling a crucial gap and bolstering their faith and reliance on God as their provider by backing up that pastor. Help us keep families together. We don’t want to create orphans by caring for orphans. Loving, well-intentioned parents surrender their children to orphanages if it will give them a better life. We believe the best life is in the love of a family. All they need is a little help to keep them together.
How do we stem the tide?
The Family Preservation Project (FPP) is a new program under Children of the Father’s House (CFH) and is just one more way CFH is working to take care of orphans in one of the youngest countries in the world. CFH wants to stem the tide of orphans coming into the residential program, by empowering and enabling loving families to stay together whenever possible. Budget permitting, it’s also a goal to provide basic necessities such as bedding and medical care.
Now we have 2 doors a child can walk through:
Whenever safe and possible, keep families together with the Family Preservation Project or
When there is simply nobody else, or no other safe option, we wrap them up in the arms of the Father in the CFH Residential program when the family of God is all they have left.
FPP serves orphaned or destitute at-risk children who are living with family members in rural Iganga and Kampala Uganda. In cases where kids have loving living relatives who want to keep their orphaned relative, FPP assists with the financial burden of school tuition and uniforms.
With average families having 5-6 children of their own, and wages under $2/day, so often families want to help, but cannot afford the additional expense of taking in an orphaned relative. The orphaned child is surrendered to a children’s home so the he or she can go to school and have enough food to eat. Worse yet, sometimes living parents surrender their biological children in order to try to give them a better life than they can provide. The family is broken up, the trauma of loss is magnified and a critical piece of identity is lost.
Through collaboration with a local church…
…the Children of the Father’s House Family Preservation Project connects each family to a community of local support and accountability. The local pastor takes a leadership role to monitor and report to CFH for the safety and well-being of the child. Quarterly, CFH staff performs the welfare checks together with the local pastor and offers other forms of training, enrichment and counsel to the families in the program in addition to the monthly visits from the local pastor. (Think of it as faith sponsored family fostering…) In this model, all arrows are pointing back to the role of the church and support of a fellowship of believers as the strength of the program.
Being such a different arrangement than our residential program, we’d like to structure the support for this program differently as well. The vision here is to connect groups to groups rather than individuals to individuals. Leveraging relationships with local churches to make the support more holistic and effective in the context of community, we would like to call upon groups in the US, who would like to support an entire FPP site, rather than an individual child at the site. We would love to invite churches, small groups, civic organizations, family foundations, or really anyone who believes in the holistic community support model we’re initiating! Would you like us to come talk to your group? Send us a message! Currently, we have sites at Kampala and Iganga. The cost of sponsoring a site is currently about $115-$160/month and serves up to 15 kids with tuition to school- significantly less per child than individual sponsorship when we take a child into the children’s home. More importantly though, children accepted for support through FPP get to preserve their identity within the context of a biological family and with connections in their local community. We know we’re called to more work in this area as the need is so great. In fact, we’d like to add another Community Lead Pastor by the end of 2019! Only 2 partnerships will allow us to do that and the first family has already stepped forward! Will your group or your family be the one to help us fully support tuition for these kids? Please use one of the donation methods below or contact us on one of the links below if you or your organization would like to take on one of our sites!