2016 1st Quarter Newsletter
Message from the Board
Welcome to our first quarterly newsletter when we reflect on our mission to help families and children, and also how two families, one in Cambodia and another in Tanzania, are progressing out of poverty. You can also click on blog below to read about the progress of other families, partners and schools during the quarter.
Our mission is to help families bring up healthy, educated and vocationally trained children who will have job opportunities in the future.
We hope to help as many children as possible over the long run, so our focus this year is to help our local partners adopt a self-sustaining economic model for self-reliance. We would like to repeat this model with future partners as a way to help more families and children.
This model relies on our partners leading by example. Showing poor rural families examples of how to become food and financially self-reliant, so that they can offer their children better opportunities in life. The main vehicle for doing this is an example farm that shows the families solutions to poverty like organically growing vegetables and raising livestock, backed up by providing technical and financial assistance to families that want to implement these solutions.
Both of the families that we talk about below started with a productive vegetable garden, which reduced their food bill and also increased their income and savings through selling vegetables. You will read how this has enabled the families to start to pay for their children’s education and build credit worthiness for business and home improvement micro-loans.
We hope you enjoy reading their stories.
With our best wishes to you,
The Better Lives Team
Featured Families
Read about more of the work we’ve been doing this quarter on our blog.
CWC, Cambodia
The CWC family is using a steady income from employment at the Peaksneng Thormacheat Garden Shop to start other income generating projects. They have started a range of projects including growing vegetables, raising livestock, fish farming, and rice farming. Having so many different projects increases the family’s monthly income and reduces their risk because of any project is affected they have other streams of income to rely on.
Laurenti, Tanzania
Lishe Bora employee Laurenti is a productive team member and an example for other families in his community. After helping students at Mkyashi Primary School harvest from their garden on a weekly basis, he became FAITH Garden Lead and has been helping families in Lishe Bora do the same. Now he is looking to increase his income to help his seven children stay in school.
Notes from the Road
At any given moment, members of the Better Lives family are all over the world. Employees, partners, volunteers, friends, and family share their experiences in our “Notes from the Road” blog series.
Visiting Families in Cambodia
This installment is brought to you by Allison Barns, a teacher from Tennessee who is traveling with her husband and Better Lives coordinator Sam Barns. She writes about the opportunity to visit with families in Cambodia.
Waiting in Africa
After working in Tanzania for five years, Better Lives’ East Africa coordinator Sam Barns has had a ot of experience with waiting. He writes about “Africa time” and why you should adjust to and enjoy it.
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