THE CHARIS PROJECT

Education empowers families to care for and protect their own children. It gives them tools to help the whole family thrive.

Summary: FAMILY EDUCATION helps at risk families build the mental, emotional and relational structures that help them grow in love, strength and health.

Problem: Significant ignorance, harmful ingrained cultural norms, deep-rooted superstition and false beliefs work together to harm families and hinder their movement toward health and strength.

Solution: We provide community-based training, focusing on 3 high leverage areas:

● Raising strong, healthy, and secure children
● Encouraging positive affirming family dynamics
● Improving overall health and hygiene

Our teams work with a diverse mix of educational curriculums both internally developed as well as quality external sources that we customize. Our objective is to ensure that our curriculum and training is easily taught to non-literate families. We organize our courses around a six session, once a week, model, which provides adequate time for engagement, understanding, retention, and commitment.

Our local staff are our key trainers and have received extensive prior training. Each of our training staff have experienced the benefits of this powerful educational curriculum and have become invaluable assets because of their intimate knowledge of the culture as well as being able to provide critical insight by having grown up within the community. They can speak first hand from within the “bubble” of their community and can make the training exponentially more alive, with an immediate impact to the families we work with.

Typically, we have 15-30 family representatives in each training. This has allowed our teams to have a dramatic impact. We have also experienced from our training model of weekly sessions over several weeks, that it provides a basis for community building which leads to increased peace, mutuality and unity among these families. We have discovered that by gathering together to learn on a weekly basis, it provides a positive focused forum for building relational bonding and trust that in turn strengthens these families for life.

Our third step is empowerment toward sustainable health and strength. Here we employ creative financing programs to partner with families to empower them to create their own financial security.

Summary: FAMILY ENTERPRISE empowers families toward independent financial sustainability. Through specific training, equipping, and resourcing, we work to launch families toward a financially sustainable future with an entrepreneurial mindset.

Problem: Financial insecurity deeply compounds all other risk factors affecting the families we work with. Lack of understanding about finances, lack of access to legitimate financial infrastructure, and lack of sufficient capital all work together to restrict a family’s opportunity to establish a sustainable and secure financial future.

Solution: We provide financial education, establish legitimate financial infrastructure, and enable access to sufficient capital empowering families to step forward with confidence.

At the center of Family Enterprise is the Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA). This model has been globally validated. Under The Charis Project’s leadership, it is being implemented in Mae Sot for the first time. By providing enterprise training, coaching, and infrastructure to these groups of families (7-15 in a group) we launch and successfully manage micro savings and loan co-ops.

These co-ops provide the structure, security, and transparency for communities to work together to save money and to provide enterprise capital within the co-op at rates far below the black-market lenders rates. Instead of going to corrupt money lenders, the service fees on the loans are distributed among the co-op members so all the funds stay within the community. In addition, these co-ops provide The Charis Project with a credit reporting system. It enables us to evaluate families for additional entrepreneurial enterprise empowerment.

We are piloting new and creative methods to enable families to launch or scale entrepreneurial micro enterprise. Our first approach is a rent-to-own program for capital equipment. We rent equipment (a sewing machine, motorcycle repair equipment, street food cart, etc.) on a contract that ends when 110% of our cost has been paid, at which time the equipment becomes the sole property of the renter.

Additionally, we are focused on making modest equity investments in growth family enterprises that are ready to expand and have positive cash flow in businesses such as a village grocery store. Each family enterprise client will pay us in partner shares of the business instead of interest payments until such time that they are able to purchase back our equity.