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| This is Manuela |
Child’s Dream Foundation (CDF) was established to focus on health, basic and higher education in Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar. The Co-Founders and head of Development met in Hong Kong after working in banking in Switzerland and decided to create Child’s Dream Foundation after identifying a need to address basic health in order for children to feel well enough to go to school. Manuela, from Switzerland, is the Director of Development. She has been with CDF since its’ early existence.
She explained that much of their basic education intervention includes infrastructure because there was a lack of classrooms within the government schools. For their higher education, they fund scholarships to see students complete school through university. Currently, In Myanmar, they have 275 students being sent to university up on their scholarships. In addition, they help support 14 junior colleges in refugee camps on the country borders.
CDF does take on volunteers for no less than 6 months. Those volunteers work in the office performing administrative tasks or working as English teachers in small villages. Other than their volunteers, CDF has 34 paid staff, which include 5 “western” staff members coming from Europe or America. In the office, there are 11 nationalities represented. Their field staff includes people from those respective countries in order to have a better cultural understanding of the projects on the ground.
With its founders coming from Swiss banking, there was a strong financial foundation to build CDF. For the last 4-5 years, they have worked with a budget of $6 million USD. This allows them to continue to build a school and build futures through scholarships. However, they still face challenges which Manuela described Thailand being one of the largest. She explained that the dynamics of how the country handles the NGOs has proven to be very difficult. In addition, they continue to have issues of the closing of refugee camps within Thailand for refugees from Myanmar. This continue interruption in their lives makes it very hard for CDF to create stability or consistency with its students.
In the future, CDF will be pursuing the building of more secondary schools overall. They will be moving away from some of their work in Laos and searching for more areas that can be served in Myanmar. The continuation of their work on the ground is made possible by their initial hiring of all local staff. CDF, though started by “westerners” has a strong on-the-ground team of those who understand the cultural implications of their work so they can effectively work with the students benefitting from their work. It is not clear that CDF could hand off CDF to all local staff, but it is clear they are aware of the cultural sensitivity of their work and focus on hiring locals.
