Hope & Resiliency Abound!
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September 17, 2007 |
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Women Empowered ~ Children Nurtured HHI's simple recipe of "empowering women and nurturing children" is reaping huge rewards for hundreds of women and thousands of orphaned and vulnerable children. There are so many exciting things in the works and beautiful stories to tell from this summer. It has been a time filled with growth and goodness and the benefits of HHI's works are tangible in the most amazing ways! Check out all the new material on our website, and stay on the inside loop with the blog posts. Read about and see the resiliency of a little girl: Returning Sathya to Her Childhood
See the beauty, strength & hope of a remote village: Views of India & Word Pictures from Orissa Touching Orissa In July HHI began a new partnership with Viswa Yuva Kendra, a grassroots NGO (non-governmental organization) that provides outreach health and human rights education and advocacy in more than 300 villages in Orissa, India. This new partnership means HHI is now able to offer our services in more needy communities and can do so in 5 languages - and the demand just keeps growing! Meet Tapaswini, HHI's newest Certified Trainer.
As soon as the women of Tapaswini's native village learned that she was an HHI Trainer, a group of 20 mothers banded together and requested that she train them - and that they would cover their own costs for materials for this because it was very important to learn how they could best support their own children. Tapaswini asked HHI if she could lead this training on her own time and promised that she would still give the HHI trainings at the orphanages and creche centers too. It was an easy and enthusiastic "YES" please give this gift to the women of your village - bettering the lives of 29 village children, while planting seeds of knowledge throughout an entire community! HHI Responds to the Demand HHI's commitment has always been to serve "the most children, at the earliest time, with the simplest, most cost effective and replicable form of care possible". Over the last 18 months, we have been working to do this on the ground in India, and along the way we have had bumps, roadblocks and challenges that we never could have predicted. It has actually been all of these obstacles that have morphed HHI's operations into what they are now, that is that we are not working in only a few orphanages as we originally planned, but rather we have become experts in providing support, consultation and training to caregivers of orphaned and other vulnerable children ages 0-5 in almost any setting. Read how HHI is meeting the growing demand. HHI is now conducting pilot projects with the Indian Government's early childcare program (ICDS) and numerous NGOs have approached HHI to learn how to apply our simple, yet powerful model to strengthen and streamline their own child health programs. In response HHI is expanding our training with the support of experts from Portland State University and we are hosting our first Annual HHI's Trainers Conference this fall in Chennai, India. The conference will bring together experts in early childhood development with HHI's Trainers and a select group of interested NGO representatives. Together we are building a stronger base of knowledge, resources, and expertise to continue to expand HHI's reach to fulfill on our goals: Empowering More Women ~ Nurturing More Children Records Were Made to Be Broken! Since the very beginning, HHI has exceeded all projections - in the groups that would seek our support, in how many women and children we could serve and most importantly how dramatically our service would impact child health! These trends only seem to be gaining speed. In the first 7 months of 2007, HHI has conducted 22 trainings for 295 women, who are directly bettering the lives of 2,595 orphaned and/or vulnerable children!
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"Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air." John Quincy Adams