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Host Dr. Laura Horvath is delighted to have Katie Milazzo and Lucy Matsumoto on the Optimistic Voices Podcast for this two-part episode. 

 Lucy is the new Executive Board President of All for One Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on work with orphans and vulnerable children.  Lucy has been involved with nonprofit for more than 35 years and was blessed to have been part of a grassroots movement that changed   the paradigm for children with disabilities in the field of play that became an international movement.  She was delighted to find All for One and get engaged with their work on behalf of children around the world.  Also with us today is Katie Milazzo, Acting Director of the Child Prosperity Centre, an AFO supported program in Sierra Leone.  Katie is originally from Illinois in the US, but has worked in Sierra Leone on and off since 2013, most recently returning in 2021 after completing her masters in Humanitarian Law at the National University of Ireland - Galway. Katie focuses her leadership on staff capacity building and community training, ultimately working towards self-sustainability and community growth. 

All across the world, organizations that have once supported an orphanage, have shifted or are shifting their model of care from residential programs that house children in institutions like orphanages or children’s homes; to programs that reintegrate children into family, and strengthen those families so that they can care well for their own children, through case management and family strengthening training.  For a lot of us, this has been challenging, but also fairly self-contained.  HCW, for example, supported a residential children’s home for 16 years in Bo, Sierra Leone, before transitioning to become a reintegration and transition support services center.  While that transition was not easy, and was certainly complex, we only had the one site to focus on, which allowed us to move step by step through the transition journey without worrying about other programs or orphanages.

What happens, though, when your US-based organization partners with programs in 23 different countries?  And to complicate matters further, in some places you support orphanages, in other places you are less directly involved?

For Part A of the episode, Katie and Lucy discuss the background and development of the Child Prosperity Centre in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa.

All for One

Child Prosperity Centre

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

Host Dr. Laura Horvath interviews the team behind the Attachment Theory Workshops being introduced as a means of bringing the lessons of Trauma-Informed care into low resource environments for social workers who work with primary caregivers taking on the challenges of accepting children into their homes to raise.

We’re really excited to introduce you to the guests on our panel today.  They’re all in some way connected to the University of Maine’s Honors College, and working collaboratively with social workers on the ground in various parts of the global south, they’ve developed  a tool to help caregivers heal the trauma of separation for themselves and their children, and learn how to form strong and healthy attachments with them.  Even in places where the caregivers themselves are not literate.  Patty Morell, an alumna of UMaine, was one of the first to even conceive of what we now call the Attachment Theory Workshop.  Patty and her husband, Allen, have been active alumni, and have always looked for ways to engage energetic, altruistic college students from their University in meaningful ways to make a difference in local and international projects and programs.  Elaine Thomas is a senior in the UMaine Honors College studying Business Management,  Alli O’Neil is a Social Worker, who began with the AT team during her undergraduate study at the UMaine. And finally, Dr. Julie DellaMattera is a professor of early Childhood Development and Education at UMaine.

Trauma-informed care (TIC) is critical in institutional settings to address not only the trauma of experiences that lead children to be enrolled into alternative care such as child care institutions (CCI), but also the inherent trauma that comes from a child being separated from her or his family.  It’s a critical consideration when orphanages transition from residential to family care models as well.  It’s critical that any reintegration plan moving children from separation (in institutional settings or living on the street) back to families.  Orgs engaged in reintegration must apply principles of trauma-informed care at every stage: from intake and care at a CCI while awaiting placement, to preparing children and families for transition, and finally to monitoring and supporting post-placement. 

 According to our panelist: It was a total surprise for them to attend the Christian Alliance for Orphans annual summit a few years ago to present the concepts of the work they were doing alongside Helping Children Worldwide and to discover the  overwhelming interest. From there, the number of organizations asking for support of this kind has grown exponentially. "We didn’t realize we had created something new, something that didn’t exist. ...a culturally competent attachment theory workshop designed specifically for non-literate caregivers. With the shift to rehome children internationally, agencies and NGOs have been looking for something that can support and strengthen families."

UMaine: https://umaine.edu/ 

Honors College: https://honors.umaine.edu/ 

Article About Trip to Sierra Leone (Minerva Magazine - see pages 8 through 13): 

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=minerva 

Video About Trip to Sierra Leone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MheEwebrdbc 

Helping Haitian Angels: https://www.helpinghaitianangels.org/ 

Cherish Uganda: 

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

____

Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact [email protected] to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

Hosts Yasmine Vaughan and Dr. Laura Horvath:
We’re happy to have with us today, Elli Oswald from Faith to Action, to talk about how they share with others best practices in short term missions. In particular, we are eager to have her talk about the importance of ethical missions in regard to safety and protection of children. Elli Oswald is the Executive Director of the Faith to Action Initiative, which seeks to elevate best practices in orphan care, specifically recognizing the importance of family in the life of every child. Prior to this role, she served the Missions Pastor at Bethany Community Church in Seattle. Elli also served on World Vision's Child Development and Rights Technical Team, specializing in community-based care for children deprived of parental care. Thanks for joining us, Elli!

Short term missions are a vital part of the work of organizations supporting missions in the majority world. When done right, short term missions enable people to travel somewhere and engage meaningfully in support of others that lifts and enriches both the missioner and the recipient.  Additionally, to put it bluntly, short term missions are often a means to enable usually western partners to ‘tell the story’ to help raise funds to support the local missions on the ground.  However, this can lead to all kinds of issues of concern, especially when those missions are focused on orphans and vulnerable children.  

Helpful links!

 With Eyes Wide Open

When Helping Hurts in Short Term Missions

Faith to Action

The Love You Give

ROK Kern

7 SOE

7 F2A practices 

Changing the Way We Care: A Family Torn

The Global Church Pledge

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

____

Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact [email protected] to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

From Rabies, to the Black Plague to Covid-19 to Monkey Pox - babies are subject to many preventable illnesses arising in their environment that can cause death. One Health is a crucial concept in understanding global health as climate change and transnational travel impact local public health issues for vulnerable populations - such as impoverished children and communities without access to healthcare.

Dr. Bernadette Dunham from the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University joins Yasmine Vaughan to discuss the idea that emerging diseases and existing medical conditions that threaten human life are better understood in the context of “one health.”

Dr. Dunham graduated from the Ontario Veterinary College, Guelph University in 1975 and joined a mixed animal practice. She  received her Ph.D. in cardiovascular pathophysiology in 1984 from Boston University and then served as Director of Laboratory Animal Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology at the State University of New York Health Science Center, Syracuse, N.Y. until 1995. She was recruited to be the Assistant Director with the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Governmental Relations Division in Washington D.C.  and interacted with Members of Congress and their staff to heighten their awareness of the diversity of the veterinary medical profession. For eight years, she helped them think beyond the concept of local vets caring for  companion animals and food-producing animals to grasp the very important role that Veterinarians and Animal Scientists play in public health – zoonotic diseases being one of the most important areas for government policies and scientific research to address the growing threat for global dissemination of infectious disease transmitted from animals to humans.  

"One Health is a collaborative, multi-sectoral, and trans-disciplinary approach - working at local, regional, national, and global levels - to achieve optimal health (and well-being) outcomes, recognizing the interconnections between people, animals, plants and their shared environment."  Centers for Disease Control, Washington, D.C.

Links to know more:

• One Health Commission https://www.onehealthcommission.org/
• CDC https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/resource-library/one-health-graphics.html
• WHO https://www.who.int/health-topics/one-health#tab=tab_1

WOAH https://www.woah.org/en/document/one-health-joint-plan-of-action-2022-2026-worki.ng-together-for-the-health-of-humans-animals-8-plants-and-the-environment/

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

____

Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact [email protected] to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

Beneeta Kulah lost her father when she was 3 years old. She was placed in a Christian orphanage in Liberia, West Africa, the country where she was born. She lived there for the next twenty years of her life, until she was released to live on her own because she was pregnant. Beneeta Kulah is a Care Leader. She is a courageous woman who grew up in alternative care who now uses her own unique voice and experiences to improve the lives of orphans and vulnerable children who are living separated from family, or who may become separated due to poverty or family crisis.

In this episode, Optimistic Voices co-hosts Emmanuel Nabieu, of Helping Children Worldwide, an internationally recognized voice of the Care Leader community, and Dr. Laura Horvath, interview Beneetta Kulah about her experiences, good and bad, in the orphanage, and seek her advice for donors in the U.S. who may be supporting orphan care around the world.

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

We’ve asked Reverend Wayne Lavender to be our guest on this episode of Optimistic Voices.  The Rev. Wayne Lavender, Ph.D., is a United Methodist pastor currently serving as the executive director of the Foundation 4 Orphans and faculty member in the political science department at Quinnipiac University. He earned his Ph.D. from George Mason’s School of Public Policy in 2010, an MA. and M.Div. from the Pacific School of Religion and his BA. from Drew University. The winner of the Harry Denman Evangelism Award in 2004 for his ministry at the New Milford UMC in New Milford, CT, Wayne has worked and taught at universities in Iraq and Mozambique. He is the author of seven books, including Pure Religion, released in 2020. Wayne lives close to nature with his wife Maureen at the conference and retreat center for the Foundation 4 Orphans in Hamden, Connecticut.

The Foundation 4 Orphans is an IRS approved 501 c 3 non-profit whose mission is to end the orphan pandemic. Their work is concentrated now in Mozambique and Iraq, but they are expanding to Syria, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

____

Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact [email protected] to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

Host Yasmine Vaughan Interviews Dr. Carrie Jo Cain,  Dr. Solomon Samura, and Dr. Benjamin Banguara in Sierra Leone, West Africa on their work to understand the causes of child mortality and impact global health and child survival rates. CHAMPS works in Mali, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, and Bangladesh and is moving into India and Nigeria in the next year. CHAMPS participates in Helping Children Worldwide’s global health coalition, Together for Global Health. To learn more about TGH, go to https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/together-for-global-health.html

For information from the World Health Organization about the progress in reducing child mortality: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/levels-and-trends-in-child-under-5-mortality-in-2020#:~:text=Since%201990%2C%20the%20global%20under,1%20in%2027%20in%202020.

Joseph Benjamin Banguara is a self-motivated Public Health and Preventive Medicine expert with more than 18 years of experience in public health practice. At World Hope, Joseph coordinates all Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) activities in the southern region of Sierra Leone. At University of Makeni (UNIMAK), Joseph has been lecturing public health courses both at undergraduate and post-graduate levels, supervising students on dissertation writing and placement for the past 7 years. Prior to World Hope, Joseph was Technical Advisor to the COVID-19 Response Team in Bombali District Northern Sierra Leone. Prior to this, Joseph worked as a Project Coordinator, Global Collaboration to Improve Patient Safety Management in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone for China Medical Board and Central South University in the People Republic of China (PRC). Joseph has a strong background on health-related research with publications on International Journals. Joseph also worked as Regional Coordinator-North, in the Community Health Workers (CHW) Program in the Ministry of Health and Sanitation of Sierra Leone. Joseph holds a Bachelor Degree in Public Health; Master’s Degree of Public Health (MPH) specialized in medicine; and currently a PhD candidate in Public Health and Preventive Medicine, major in Epidemiology and Health statistics awaiting result at the Central South University, China.


The Strategic Development Goals adopted by most countries around the globe include reducing newborn mortality to at least as low as 12 per 1000 live births in every country; and reduce under-5 mortality to at least as low as 25 per 1000 live births in every country.

Substantial global progress has been made in reducing childhood mortality since 1990. The total number of under-5 deaths worldwide has declined from 12.6 million in 1990 to 5 million in 2020. Since 1990, the global under-5 mortality rate has dropped by 60%, from 93 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to 37 in 2020. This is equivalent to 1 in 11 children dying before reaching age 5 in 1990, compared to 1 in 27 in 2020.

While the global under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) fell to 37 (35–­­40) deaths per 1000 live births in 2020, children in sub-Saharan Africa continued to have the highest rates of mortality in the world at 74 (68–­­86) deaths per 1000 live births- 14 times higher than the risk for children in Europe and North America.


For more information regarding mortality in Sierra Leone, please check out the Countrywide Mortality Surveillance for Action (COMSA) for Sierra Leone and their publications: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214109X21004599

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

____

Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact [email protected] to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

Host Yasmine Vaughan speaks with three educators from Virginia and Texas on their experiences in participating in the Teachers’ Learning Collaborative with teacher-leaders from Sierra Leone. Sharon Gardner, from Grapevine, Texas, is the project lead teacher, and has been traveling to participate in Short Term Mission  in Sierra Leone five times since 2016 years. Janie Williams is an elementary school teacher from Virginia. Janie has traveled three times since 2018. Melissa Herbleshimer, also from Virginia, is on her first short term mission.

The mission team discusses what it means to work in collaboration with local leaders in your field of expertise when you come from a different culture, and the similarities and differences in the work. The opportunity to come to Africa to teach summer school to children in an orphanage for a very short time period is different from what teachers do when they travel with HCW now. Now teachers work in collaboration with teachers in a different country to develop a train the trainer “in-service” for teachers in Sierra Leone. The team describes some of the concerns they had with whether what they had done previously actually helped, although the experiences the teachers on mission had were delightful. They explain how working with adults is a blessing that is even more exciting and rewarding than teaching summer school, because of a greater potential for the outcome of the work to bring about real change and help teachers to help their whole school system. 

Although the teachers all agree that there is a special  heartwarming experience in  working with children that they personally cherish, they have found that working with adults in a collaborative workgroup from multiple cultures was equally heartwarming. The experience of sharing the struggle, brainstorming ideas, and navigating strong disagreements in a truly respectful and collaborative space has proven to be personally more transformative in the long term in their own lives. 

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, guest host Rev. Tom Berlin, Senior Pastor of Floris UMC in Herndon, Virginia, and co-founder of the mission of Helping Children Worldwide, interviews a panel of representatives from the UMC Strong Family for Every Child initiative. The panelists include Emmanuel Nabieu Director of Mission Advance and Partnership from Helping Children Worldwide, Rev. Wayne Lavender of Foundation for Orphans, and Sheree Reece, Director of Global Missions from Church of the Resurrection. Foundation for Orphans supports several orphan missions in Mozambique COR is the largest UMC congregation in the world, located in the Kansas City, Kansas region, with a large outward-focused mission directive, and site for the annual Leadership Institute in September. Sheree hosts the popular new podcast Bridging Cultures.  Along with the panelists, the episode features special appearances by Rev. Gaston Warner and Reegan Kabieri of Zoe Empowers in a pre-recorded segment.

The panel examines the global orphan crisis through the lens of family separation, agreeing with our friends at Faith to Action that the solution for orphanhood isn’t an institution or a building, it’s a family. The panelists describe the diverse range of family-based options that are available, and agree no matter which option they find most appealing, that their individual and collective faith calls for them to provide family for every orphaned child, rather than build orphanages to house a few.

For more about the work of individual panelists, or the Breaking Bread From House to House Table Fellowship at the COR Leadership Institute, please check out these links.

Reverend Tom Berlin 

Floris United Methodist Church  

Reverend Wayne Lavender

Foundation for Orphans

Sheree Reece

Church of the Resurrection
and
Bridging Cultures Podcast


Emmanuel “Nabs” Nabieu

Helping Children Worldwide

Reverend Gaston Warner

Zoe Empowers

A special shout out to our friends at Faith to Action for the brilliant quote! 

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

____

Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact [email protected] to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

Yasmine’s guest today, is Heather Hall:
Heather has a wide range of expertise in the field. She has a Graduate degree in global public health nursing, previously worked as a nurse in Kenya, did consulting public health work in Kenya and a few other African countries, is a former Program Coordinator for the Tuberculosis/Refugee/Immigration Programs at a health department in Ohio, and recently did COVID-19 policy work for a local health department in Oregon.

Yaz and Heather discuss the definition of Global Health, the Sustainable Development Goals and their relationship to Health, and dispel the three main misconceptions about global health.

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

____

Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact [email protected] to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone.  Your small monthly donation,  prayers, attention & caring is essential. You  advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org