Excellent orphan care community – is that a paradox?
Over the past few posts, we’ve examined some of the realities in the orphan crisis facing us today, problems inherent in institutional orphanages, and the needs present in the life of every orphan.
We’ve also introduced a hope for something more — for excellence in orphan care communities. While it isn’t an easy road, it is a realistic and attainable one if we join together with fervor, real relationship, wisdom, discernment, and a lot of hard work.
At the core of our discussion about excellence and best practice in orphan care, and our response to the inadequacies of institutional orphanages has been a framework.
A framework with nine prongs.
Nine prongs that, if properly implemented in concert with each other, have the potential to develop the lives of millions of children who might not otherwise receive lasting and effective care and love in their absence.
So what is the framework?
The framework tracks universal, common threads of best practices for orphan care communities that cross cultural, societal, and all other boundaries. It results from extensive research, collaboration between and among dozens of excellent orphan care providers, including several who are contributing authors on the book project, over six years of hands-on experience with Providence’s incubator model orphan care community in Honduras, La Providencia, and visits to many other orphan care communities and orphanages around the world.
Making up the framework are the following nine essential prongs:
(i) Family
(ii) Education
(iii) Medical care
(iv) Psychosocial care
(v) Nutrition
(vi) Community integration
(vii) Self-sustainability
(viii) National leadership and
(ix) Spiritual formation.
Each of the prongs must be strategically implemented with utmost quality into any orphan care community that strives to fully develop its children to their God-given potential. Though that implementation will look different in every community and culture around the world, we hope and pray that the results will be strikingly similar.
That millions of orphaned children will be grafted into families and will be developed into gospel-driven leaders who will impact their communities, local and global, in incredible ways.
Over the next few months, we’ll be diving deeper into each of the prongs. Stay tuned . . .
