This Life In Community

In Cambodia, around 49,000 children live in institutions due to many issues including domestic violence, lack of educational opportunity in rural areas, poverty, and limited social protection. I am proud to be working on the This Life in Community program, which engages and builds the capacity of local authorities while also mobilising community wide support for children and families, so that communities can lead the response to these issues. Hong Sarith, This Life in Community Program Coordinator

About the Program

With This Life in Community, our goal is to enlist community support for children and families who are at risk of being separated primarily due to family members being imprisoned. Community members want to help and support one another and are often best placed to aid their neighbours who are experiencing challenging circumstances.

What we do

As with all of our programs, we strive to build the capacity of residents to identify and respond to issues within their communities, by:

Enabling the community to respond to cases of potential child-family separation
Strengthening collaboration and cooperation of service providers (NGOs, government bodies) to prioritise community based care options over institutional care.
Ensuring communities are aware of the resources and support services available for children and families
Conducting awareness raising campaigns focused on the benefits of raising children within their families and communities as opposed to institutions

Outcomes for all of This Life’s programs can be found in our Annual Report.