Trailblazer Foundation

This is Ratanak, pictured with school children in Siem Reap

After multiple trips to Cambodia, founders Chris and Scott Coats decided to move to Siem Reap, Cambodia to dedicate their lives to improving the water quality for local Cambodians. They began Trailblazer Foundation (TF) after seeing that some basic needs were not being met, such as clean water. Their first project was the building of a school but quickly shifted their focus to well digging and water filter installations once they saw they could serve more this way. Now they do branch out to things such as appropriate agriculture projects and micro financing, but it all started with water.  Weekly, they are still installing up to 14 filters in one of the 3 provinces in they work in Cambodia. 

The onsite staff for TF is made up of 12 Cambodians and 1 American. Although the foundations members of TF are all American, they have been intentional of hiring local staff to run their Angkor location. This way they can continue to reach rural communities through local Cambodians who know the culture and NGO landscape. 

Ratanak has been working for Trailblazer for 5 years as the field manager. Here is oversees the many projects that TF Angkor take on. He is responsible for the over 200 volunteers that come to TF to help assemble the water filters for as short as just a day or as long as multiple months. They rely on this volunteer support to ensure enough water filters can go out to the many villages they serve. Ratanak says that he not only enjoyed the work but the compensation allows him to provide for his family. Ratanak along with the other employees at TF Angkor have dedicated individuals that are trying to answer the needs of their community and continually giving back. 

Started by an American couple, TF’s on the ground crew is solely made of Cambodians. They are a passionate group of young people that feel empowered to work with local communities on the group to make their daily lives better. With guidance from their founders, Ratanak, and his crew have autonomy to manage their projects in ways that are fit for the community. With the high intake of volunteers and interns, they also create a space for voluntourism to thrive. The volunteers work for both the benefit of themselves as they experience a new country and also the communities that receive TF’s services. 

Ponheary Ly Foundation

This is Ponheary (right) and Lori (left)

Comprised of two powerful women, the Ponheary Ly Foundation (PLF) is a mix of both “western” and “eastern” philosophy. Ponheary Ly is the founder and mastermind of this NGO. Born in 1962, Ponheary was born into an educated family. She started school, but that was quickly interrupted by the conflict with the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge influence dictated her life until 1979 when Vietnamese military liberated Cambodia. However, Ponheary lost her father and years of education during this time. 

In 1981, she started school again and it was soon after that Ponheary became a primary school teacher. Ponheary worked hard to became a teacher, which included learning how to speak English, French, and Russian. To make ends meet, Ponheary and her siblings also became tour guides. This was when Ponheary became more aware of the problem of child beggars in Cambodia. They are forced to work for money and are robbed the opportunity to go to school. Ponheary saw the problem with this and used the opportunity of being a tour guide to education tourists about the problem. 

Ponheary also started funding children to go to school. In 2001-2005, her and her family helped 200 children afford the uniform to attend schools. It was around this time Ponheary also met Lori on one of her tours. Lori was inspired by Ponheary’s story and mission to allow more children attend school each year. Lori, who was in banking, was able to help Ponheary financially and eventually started the Ponheary Ly Foundation. Lori eventually moved to Siem Reap full time to help Ponheary manage the foundation and now they support nearly 2,800 students. 

PLF works with 5 primary schools and are following their students as they continue to secondary school, high school, and even university. Currently, there are 50 students who are attending a university with the help of PLF, including 1 medical students. 

PLF has no intention of growing. They are aware of their size and the scope of work they can accomplish with their budget of $500,000 USD. They want to continue to fund children through the entire education journey, instead of dropping support after primary or secondary school. Lori discussed the challenge this presents with some of her donors that are more interested in funding young children, but lose interest as they grow older. They also have a social enterprise to manage. PLF is partially supported by a guesthouse in Siem Reap called Seven Candles. This is also where Lori and Ponheary Ly’s family live. With all these moving parts, PLF is growing their staff and donor reach. They want to continue to support children through their education journey, which included providing meals and clean water at school, IT and computer classes and giving them a sense of consistency and peace while expanding their minds.

Started by Cambodians, PLF is an inspirational story. As they grow in size, PLF has hired a multinational staff made up of Cambodians, Americans, and British, just to name a few. With the help of Lori, Ponheary was able to bring her dreams into reality and now manages a large NGO that helps thousands of young students every day.  

Art Relief International

This is Emma

Emma is the Art Director for Art Relief International (ARI). Emma, whose is Canadian, became familiar with ARI by being a volunteer in 2013 for 3 months. She loved the organization. She has not been working with them for a year and a half. This job has made her want to go on to become an art therapist in order to continue to promote art as a form of expression and therapy. 

Emma explained that ARI’s cultural campus is located in Chiang Mai, Thailand and offers opportunities for volunteers to come and work with local community artistically. Their staff includes 2 foreign paid staff, 2 Thai staff and 15 volunteers. ARI goes to all their clients. Some of the places they work are within prisons, single mothers groups, refugee populations and school-aged children. Their exposure to these groups can be anywhere between a one-time visit, so a weekly/monthly on-going relationship, for between 1-2 hours for each visit. ARI sees their work as allowing others to express themselves and offering a time to relax and meditate through art. Most of their volunteers are coming from other countries and stay between 3 weeks and 6 months. This presents part of their challenge as an organization, which is the turnover of volunteers. Emma explained that it often takes a couple of weeks to get “plugged” into their programs, and if volunteers leave after only a couple of weeks, it does not give much time to get comfortable with the world. Another challenge is the language barriers between volunteers and participants. ARI only has one paid staff member who speaks the local languages, making it difficult to talk to participants. However, Emma said that the positive outcomes are a sense of community, even without a common language. Lots of the sessions focus on self-confidence building, particularly with the children they work with. 

Emma talked about some of the opportunities in the near future being reaching out to more of the local population in order to incorporate more culturally appropriate art into their programs. They have begun to work with Chiang Mai University to get their students more involved. She identified that volunteering is not within the Thai culture the same way it is ingrained in many western cultures. This creates a challenge when they try to include more Thai people into their art education.

ARI relies on private donors and volunteer fees to fund all their programs. It costs volunteers about $700USD to volunteer with ARI. Therefore, this is also a consistent hardship and that may help explain for their slim staffing. Many nonprofits will echo difficulties with funding, particularly those that are smaller. However, ARI is working hard to work consistently with the communities that they’ve built relationships with. They are a passionate group that had big hopes for the future and lots of room to grow.

ARI’s Thai employees serve as drivers and a translator. Emma identified the need to take on more local influence in order to better serve their community. Without that, ARI is at risk of continuing to push “western” ideals and culture onto Thai communities. Although ARI is offering a great opportunity for people from other nations to come and engage with some Thai communities, there is the question of who are the people they are truly serving? 

Childs Dream

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.