More About Global Orphan Relief
Our Mission
Our mission is simple: to provide loving support for orphans, fostering a greater capacity for physical, spiritual, and emotional healing and growth.
This begs the question: what or who is an orphan child? One definition would be, “a child who has lost both parents through death, or, less commonly, one parent.” According to UNICEF, they, and their global partners, define an orphan as a child under 18 years of age who has lost one or both parents to any cause of death... This definition contrasts with those in many industrialized countries, which requires that a child must have lost both parents to qualify as an orphan.
While our target beneficiary is the orphaned child, we do not have rigid definitions, and instead, consider an orphaned child to be any child that lacks parental guidance and support. Consider the following: what if a child is abandoned, or somehow separated from their parents? In some cases, there are children that have both biological parents living, but no support is available, or their location is unknown.
Our initiatives that support children in need includes a vague criterion by which to determine who should be eligible for assistance. Primary determination is left to our field partners, with a clearly stated priority to serve orphaned children. Having one or more parents pass away is a tangible indicator of a child’s vulnerability. However, many individual and household circumstances expose children to economic, social, and health risks.
An operational term “orphans and vulnerable children” (OVC) has been coined to aid program targeting many NGO’s. This term includes not only children who are orphaned following a parental death but also children considered vulnerable to shocks that jeopardize their health and well-being. This including the chronic illness of a parent and other household factors.
Based on a recent audit, we are in the process of better defining the children in our Nutrition initiative in terms of their status. As we began this partnership in February 2016, with 300 orphaned children, we believed that we could somehow feed these children without providing any level of nutrition for the other vulnerable children at the school. Of course, all of these children are in need, and with additional children coming to school in search of their own food provisions, our field partner in South Sudan, Christ Mission to the World, made the decision to begin feeding all of the children. We supported this decision, but the beneficiaries of our support stretched beyond the orphaned child parameters at the beginning of 2019. We could not stand by and watch children go hungry, simply because they could not be technically defined as orphaned.
In addition to vulnerable children, many widows are also blessed through our initiatives. In fact, the care we provide, at whatever level, has a ripple effect throughout the entire community as we demonstrate God’s love for His people.
