Asking the Tough Questions

By Jason Schwartzman,
Director of Program Development

Note: This is the fifth entry from Jason’s trip to the Philippines.


In my last blog entry, I shared a few quotes from a retired colleague who was reflecting on how Christian Children's Fund learned over time the importance of working with families as a group, to organize them so they could do for themselves. That colleague's name is Jim Hostetler, and there he is in the photo (middle of the bottom row). This is from the 1970s in Guatemala with National Office staff.

One of the boldest efforts to learn and reflect on CCF's work came from the third president of CCF – Verent Mills. In a prior blog I shared a photo of him in his younger days with a group of young children in China who were orphans. Here he is a number of years later:


That same young man ended up being president of CCF from 1970 to 1981. You'd think that a guy who had been working in the same organization for all those years would know pretty much everything there was to know, but what was one of the first initiatives he undertook in his new job?

"We were saying we were helping these children, and I wanted to know exactly how we were helping them," he said at the time. "Was it true we were preparing the children to be better citizens in their communities, as we claimed in our literature? If it wasn't true, then we were wasting the sponsors' money." To answer this question, Mills in 1972 hired Dr. Charles G. Chakerian, a social scientist from the University of Chicago.

"[Chakerian] prompted a lot of consciousness-raising at CCF about its purpose. Their message was that you can’t effectively help a child apart from the context of his or her family, community and nation. That context includes the whole pattern of economic and social development. It isn’t just a simplistic thing: help the child."

For example, one of the Chakerian’s recommendations stated that it would be more effective if CCF focused on carefully selected countries or areas of countries, rather than trying to do a little all over the map. The choice of a location came to depend on whether by being there we could influence social and economic development as well as the immediate well-being of the sponsored children.

"Dr. Chakerian helped CCF realize how important it was to critically assess the types of programs being supported. In the past, such analysis was lacking: to some degree, good intentions on the part of those running specific programs were thought to be enough to ensure that good results would follow."

Asking tough questions and challenging ourselves is the struggle we tackle in the middle of this workshop. Are we reaching deprived, excluded and vulnerable children through our programs? Are the programs the right ones, and what evidence do we have that they are? Are our partnerships with communities maturing over time?

Today we break out of the meeting room and spend the day in a nearby community where each of us will have a host family who we will stay the night with. We hope that this immersion in a community will give us some new insights. I better go pack – I don't want to be late once again. Actually, there's little danger of that. I fall asleep early, and am wide awake by 3 a.m. One of the "pleasures" of being in a different time zone!

Coming soon: Meet the community.

Read More......

History Lessons

By Jason Schwartzman,
Director of Program Development

Note: This is the fourth entry from Jason’s trip to the Philippines.


It’s amazing what you can learn from history, and how relevant those lessons can be for today. The challenges are constant, but the people trying to break through those challenges changes over the years. Separated by generations, it’s only through historical records that we can create that sense of connection and feel the commonality of our struggles. Christian Children's Fund staff moved from orphanages as the program model to a community-based approach named "The Family Helper Project." Lessons were learned along the way.

One of my favorites is this quote from a colleague I worked with when I first came to CCF, who retired a number of years ago: "The assumption is that the beneficiary – a young mother, for example – can’t make decisions for herself; she needs a caseworker to get approval from if she wants to spend money for this or for that. The caseworker approach assumes that the individuals and families being aided are dysfunctional. In those days, we did not realize that what people need most is control over their own lives. In most cases, it is the absence of such control that causes dysfunction.”


"The emphasis was on what we could do for them. There was little thought of encouraging people to do something for themselves. We did not understand that in order to maximize our resources, the best thing would have been to get these people working together from the start. They were capable of doing that, but somehow we saw them as 'cases'. We had caseworkers. They would go out and deliver the money to the families. There was very little interaction between the families."

Our generation of CCF carries forward this intention, and we have voiced it as one of the results we seek as a global organization. If infants are to be healthy and secure, children to be educated and confident, and youth to be skilled and involved, families and local organizations must be networked in their communities and promote the development and protection of children.

Read More......

The First Program (R)Evolution

By Jason Schwartzman,
Director of Program Development

(Note: This is the third entry from Jason's trip to the Philippines.)

"Verent Mills (pictured above) had been the American Advisory Committee’s field supervisor of famine relief in the unoccupied region of Sz Yup since 1941. In his work, he came across hundreds of children – sometimes alone, more often in small groups – wandering the countryside or haunting the villages of the delta. The children he encountered reminded him of ‘packs of little wolves,’ searching, scavenging, begging for something to eat. When he took them in, setting up five impoverished orphanages … all the children were malnourished, many with bloated stomachs and skeletal frames characteristic of progressive starvation." (From "A Book About Children," by Larry Tise, that reports CCF's history from 1938 to 1991.)

From this humble start evolved CCF's program model of orphanages that housed, fed and educated children, and helped to establish CCF's global reputation. Why would a successful organization that had acquired such rich experience and expertise move away from a successful model? That's pretty bold!

The following from "A Book About Children" explains how CCF approached things nearly 50 years ago: "The Korean Association of Voluntary Agencies, conducted a study in 1960 to determine where the children in CCF-assisted institutions had come from, how long they had been in the homes, and how many of them actually returned to their families when they left. The findings were unequivocal. A large proportion of these children had been transformed into ‘orphans’ by their families. We began to understand that by working exclusively in institutional settings, we were actually bringing children into the institutions. Parents would go through all kinds of shenanigans to get their child into an orphanage so that he could get an education."

As a result, after painful discussion and soul searching, CCF decided to create a community-based model that became known as the "Family Helper Project." This was the first time that an external organization had scrutinized CCF's established program model, and CCF staff, after taking it in, responded in a progressive way to create a new program approach. But it wasn't the last time!

CCF's history contains several examples of years of relative program stability being "upset" in a positive manner by self-assessment and reflection. As one workshop participant said, "I didn't realize CCF was such a courageous organization."

Coming soon: History lessons.

Read More......

Stepping Back into CCF's Past

By Jason Schwartzman,
Director of Program Development

(Note: This is the second entry from Jason's trip to the Philippines.)

So I'm in the airport pickup van, racing to this workshop where each National Office in Asia has sent four or so staff to participate in what we've called "Integrating the Bright Futures Approach with CCF's Core Programs - A Pilot Course in Asia." Bright Futures is the name CCF has given to the participatory way we work with communities – how we engage them in identifying priorities to address through programs, and their role in creating a better future for their children. Core Programs is the name CCF has given to the types of programs we focus on – programs that build on the natural stages of child development, from infancy (for example, health, nutrition and early childhood development programs) through young adulthood (where we want to focus on youth leadership, livelihood preparation and making healthy decisions about one's life).

There's a lot of traffic. That's good. More time to finish my presentation, which is scheduled in a few hours. If it doesn't go well, I have an excuse – I've been en route from Richmond for the past 30 hours. Unfortunately, I've been able to sleep a lot along the way, so I actually won't have much of an excuse.

My presentation is about CCF's history from a program point of view. How has CCF's approach to programming evolved over the years? What triggered a (r)evolution from one phase to the next? What has that felt like to our colleagues who preceded us? What can we learn from that history? The Philippines is a great place to be thinking about that, since CCF (then called China's Children Fund) launched programming here in February 1946 – along with Burma, these were the next two countries that CCF worked in after China.

What's struck me in reviewing CCF's history is that CCF has had three major programming "epochs" in its 70 year history – starting with orphanages, then shifting to a community-based design often referred to as "Family Helper Projects," and then most recently, evolving into Bright Futures that we will now integrate with our core intent, core outcomes and core programming. But the history of CCF is much more dynamic than the relative stability of "only" three program shifts in 70 years would suggest. CCF has a deep tradition of challenging itself with tough questions, and the real story of CCF is in the transitions between points of stability.

Anyway, that's the story I'm going to tell, and I'm sticking to it. I've been searching through the photo archives with the help of our communications staff, and I've create an enormously large file of 70-plus PowerPoint slides with the same number of photographs. With my luck it will all crash in the middle of the presentation, if this airport pickup van doesn't crash first. These guys head into oncoming traffic in order to turn or pass a car. LOOOOOKKKKKKKKOOOOUUUUUTTTTT!!!!!

Coming soon: CCF's first program evolution ... or was it a revolution?

Read More......