HOW WE WORK
Prevent
Keeping Families Together
Stabilizing families so that children never enter institutional care.
Provide
Family-Like Care
Elevating Orphan Care by collaborating with institutions and training caregivers in our holistic model.
Place
Adoption
Uniting children with their forever families through international and domestic adoption programs.
Prepare
Supporting Orphans Aging Out
Transforming lives through Independence programs that give older orphans the tools they need to thrive.
Policy
Changing the System
Influencing child welfare policy at the highest levels of government to clear paths to family and independence.
HOW WE’RE INTERVENING
Prevent
Sponsorship provides much needed support for children and families in crisis. When you sponsor a child’s education, you aren’t just enabling them to attend school—you’re also providing essential support so they can remain within a family! All of the children in our Education Sponsorship Program live within a vulnerable family. Often, Education Sponsorship means the difference between remaining within their family or entering into an institution. Education Sponsorship ensures that your sponsored child is able to attend school, remain within their family’s care, receive healthy meals to fuel their studies, and save for their future education! This program lifts up entire communities by helping children break the cycle of poverty and follow their dreams!
We empower single parents by giving them the micro-grants and support they need to start their own businesses and better provide for their children. Through an income-generating grant, families in crisis are able to stabilize, gain confidence and valuable skills, and create their own sustainable businesses. AGCI’s Micro-Grant Program focuses on education, sustainability, and empowerment. We equip vulnerable families with the tools they need to become successful, independent entrepreneurs who are able to provide for their children and give back to their communities through job creation. By providing vulnerable families with these essential grants, we’re lifting up entire communities and enabling families to stay together.
At 30 years old, Sayra has 2 boys and a girl. She lives alone with her three children, after leaving an abusive marriage 5 years ago. Since receiving her AGCI Micro-Grant a year ago, Sayra has been making bags and purses from recycled materials. Before, she sold clothes, but the competition was so extreme that it was difficult to earn enough to support her children.
“My new job has given me more time to spend with my children. I used to work from 8 am to 6:30 pm seven days a week. Now I can take my children to school, eat with them, and help them with their homework. I’m not even sure if I would still be with my children if I had to continue in my old job. I might not have been able to continue paying for us all,” said Sayra.
Provide
By collaborating with institutions and training caregivers, we’re providing family-like, elevated care for orphans and ensuring they receive the healthy food, medical care, education, hope, and love they need to thrive.
Sponsorship keeps this level of care sustainable. By sponsoring an orphan’s care, you’re helping to ensure they receive the elevated, loving care they need to thrive. This means that your sponsored child has access to the healthy food, medical care, education, and 24/7 loving care they need to grow up happy and healthy. This care is truly life changing, and sadly, is not the norm in many countries throughout the world. AGCI is seeking to change the level of care that children receive in institutions worldwide so every orphan knows just how loved they are!
Through a long-term advocacy plan, we’re able to provide a path to the best possible family environment for every child. AGCI is committed to what’s best for each individual child. We work diligently to ensure a plan for family is in place–whether that’s placing a child within a foster or forever family, reuniting a child with their birth family as circumstances change, or supporting an older orphan as they age out of care and transition into independent adulthood.
After she was relinquished by her birth mother, Zeritu was brought to the home we are working with in Ethiopia in March of 2014. Sadly, Zeritu was born without sight. While shy and disoriented upon arrival, over the next year, Zeritu began to blossom thanks to the round-the-clock love and care from her special mothers. Zeritu began to laugh and smile again; quickly becoming the happy, carefree little girl she is today. Thanks to the creation a long-term individualized family care plan, Zeritu now lives, and is loved, in the arms of her own forever family.
Place
We believe that every child deserves the love of a family. Through our adoption programs around the world, we’re helping more children unite with their loving forever families. AGCI is committed to finding families for children, not children for families and our team of experienced, passionate adoption advisers is here to walk every step of this journey with you. AGCI currently has international adoption programs in Bulgaria, Burundi, China, Colombia, Haiti, the Philippines, and the United States.
Prepare
Through education and vocational training, we’re working to help orphans transition to independence, break the cycle of poverty, and create successful futures. These programs give hope to a group of children that’s often forgotten. You can impact older orphans by providing them with the sponsorship and encouragement they need to follow their dreams, earn their degrees, and become independent adults.
Without the support of sponsorship and guidance from mentors, 19-year-old Husuna’s future would likely be that of so many other uneducated, orphaned girls in Ethiopia: Filled with struggle and exploitation. Happily, that is not Husuna’s story; an AGCI family has sponsored Husuna’s education since she was 12 years old and she’s now entering her 3rd year of college as a nursing student!
Policy
Through Child Advocacy Centers that act as a regional hub, we can partner with and empower local leaders to serve as advocates and create more pathways to family. By recruiting, training, and lifting up leaders, together, we can influence governmental policy, implement nationwide social service programs and trainings, lead sponsorship programs, and coordinate advocacy teams in country.
Through sponsorship programs and partnerships with churches and local advocates, we can elevate the level of care while also finding solutions for the unique structural, cultural and economic challenges that need to be overcome in order to establish permanency for orphans and families in crisis.
