Optimistic Voices
Vital voices in the fields of global health, global child welfare reform and family separation, and those intent on conducting ethical missions in low resource communities and developing nations. Join our hosts as they engage in conversations with diverse guests from across the globe, sharing optimistic views, experiences, and suggestions for better and best practices as they discuss these difficult topics.
Optimistic Voices
Celebrating 25 Years of Local Empowerment and Global Collaboration
Explore the power of transformation and empowerment in this special retrospective episode of Optimistic Voices. Join Dr. Laura Horvath, Emmanuel Nabeu, and Yasmin Vaughn as we promise to uncover the compelling journey of Helping Children Worldwide (HCW) through 2024, celebrating remarkable milestones and visionary shifts in global leadership. We reflect on standout episodes that shed light on crucial topics like maternal and child health improvements in Sierra Leone, transitioning care leavers to adulthood, and fostering dynamic partnerships between NGOs and churches. Our discussions dive deep into the empowerment model, highlighting a pivotal movement from immediate relief to sustainable growth, with a closer look at our fruitful collaboration with the Sierra Leone Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Journey with us as we recount our global adventures and pioneering initiatives throughout 2023. Our visits to Kenya and Mozambique, and participation in significant international conferences like the CAFO Summit and the ICAR 8 conference, have deeply informed our focus on transitioning orphanages to family care models across Africa. Yasmin Vaughn offers insights from the Rising Tides Conference, revealing how intimate collaborations among global health professionals are crucial to empowering communities and strengthening family bonds. Learn how these experiences have shaped our collective mission to create lasting impacts in child welfare and global health.
Celebrate the growth of Helping Children Worldwide as we approach our 25th anniversary in 2025, emphasizing our commitment to shifting power and decision-making to local leaders in the Global South. This transformative journey is highlighted by empowering local solutions, exemplified by the successful training of 98 midwives in emergency procedures for maternal and child health. Through stories of local leadership driving innovative solutions, such as self-sustainability initiatives at Mercy Hospital, we underscore our dedication to fostering local insights and collaborative global alliances for meaningful, enduring change.
Give Generously - Make a difference!! As we wrap up the year, Helping Children Worldwide will be making a difference for families in need through our support for healthcare, education, and economic empowerment programs.
Join us in our Year-End Campaign celebrating 25 years of impact and starting 2025 strong. Your generosity is the light that shines across the world as a beacon of hope, transforming lives and creating bright futures.
Visit go to helpingchildrenworldwide.org to learn how you can be a part of the solution
A new documentary on orphanage response - the right way!
There is no shortage of need in this big, messy world, but with your help, together we can change the world!
Helpingchildrenworldwide.org
I'm Dr Melody Curtis, Executive Director of Helping Children Worldwide, and occasionally I get to host an episode of Optimistic Voices, and occasionally I get to host an episode of Optimistic Voices More frequently. That honor goes to Dr Laura Horvath, Emmanuel Nabeu and Yasmin Vaughn, all of whom are here with me today. Say hi guys, Hi guys, Hello, Hi. We want to welcome our listeners to our 2024 end-of-year review. First, I want to celebrate with you that Optimistic Voices is now in the top 50% of podcasts in terms of leadership, impact and global reach. Let's celebrate for a minute. That was fun.
Speaker 1:But also our content is fabulous, If I do say so myself, radically honest, even conversations from learned voices working in the spaces of child and family welfare, global health and ethical mission practices on topics ranging from the controversial to the inspirational and even a tiny bit of the reassuring. So, regardless of how hard the topic may be, we close every episode with a note of optimism from these amazing humans who are changing the world. Before we begin to discuss the future of Helping Children Worldwide, I'd like to give each of our hosts the opportunity to speak of one show this season in optimistic voices that they think our listeners should hear again, or for the first time, if they missed it when it was released and one from our prior seasons. So please keep it to 30 seconds each if you can.
Speaker 3:Well, I can hop in and go first. My favorite are actually two episodes this year the two episodes we did on our maternal and child health mission project, which features the work that HCW is doing to expand in health system strengthening through training midwives in Sierra Leone.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I have a second here From the recent episodes. I'm going to take from there my two favorites. One, the experiences of five care leavers. You know, children I grew up with in the orphanage, but now they are all adults, so the orphanage is titled From Orphanage to Adult Food Resilience and Adaptation in Sierra Leone. That is very if you missed that, you want to listen to that, just hearing the stories of those care leavers. And then the second one is the episode on engaging your church with angel, this kind of perspectives from the pastors on the joy that comes from healthy partnership between NGOs and churches, ours helping children worldwide as they express their unity in Christ and allow more opportunity to serve with their diverse expertise. And thank you to the guests of those episodes Reverend JC, and as well as Reverend Gina from Throis, unc and now Reverend JC from Baddow Street.
Speaker 5:Thank you All right, I think it's my turn.
Speaker 5:I think this might be cheating, but usually my favorite episode of Optimistic Voices is the one that was the most recent, and that's true in this case, I think.
Speaker 5:It's called Be the Change and it features two of our friends and colleagues from the Global South, george and David, and right now it's my favorite because it's evidence of how leaders in the Global South are stepping into center stage and taking the ground, but actually entering into a global conversation about care, reform for children, and it's just really cool to see them stepping into roles that are new to them and putting us in roles that are new to us in ways that I'm sort of excited about. And if I have to think about one in the past, the first one that comes to mind is it might've been the first episode. It was with Dr Andrea Siegel and Dan Hope from Strengthening Families and Children. We actually recorded it in Sierra Leone and it was kind of about the role of social work and best practices in social work in terms of child welfare, family strengthening, child protection. So yeah, I guess I bookended our entire existence on optimistic voices.
Speaker 1:Well, I am going to cheat Listeners. I think you should stay tuned to us right now and then share this episode with a friend and listen to it a second time with them, and then you know, maybe you could also listen to the December 23rd 2022 episode. Yes, melody, we can change the world. We thought we'd give you a glimpse into the things we talk about at the international headquarters as we prepare to take stock of the progress we made since December 2022. If you tuned in in 2022 to Optimistic Voices, you would have learned that HCW leaned into the empowerment model of international development, with the belief that it was better than a relief model if you wanted to achieve a sustainable development in the global south. Hey, laura, it occurs to me that maybe I'm using language that not all of our listeners recognize. Global south, global north Can you give us a quick definition of those terms?
Speaker 5:Sure. So I think in the past, in terms of international development, we've probably talked about developing nations. That was probably the vernacular that we used for a while. These days we talk about the global north and the global south, and the global south tends to be those on the ground doing the actual day-to-day client-facing.
Speaker 1:You know, roll up your sleeves, facing the challenges, work where those of us in the global north and HCW's international staff considers ourselves to be primarily a global north organization tend to be the capacity builders, the bridge to resources that kind of thing, and the reason it's north versus south is that, from a geographical standpoint, most of the impoverished nations actually exist in the Southern Hemisphere, although not all impoverished communities exist outside of the Global North and not all of the Global South is impoverished.
Speaker 1:This year we spent a great deal of time in conversation with our longest term ally, which is the Sierra Leone Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, and Sierra Leone is very much in the global south. We wanted to talk with them about our 25-year history together and where we each imagine we could take our shared mission forward. That is obviously a board-to-board level leadership conversation. Consequently, we brought along our board chair, mr Rick Amann, to share his perspective with you, our listeners, on the outcome of that conversation, and we will get to all of that later. But sorry, rick, I did not give you a chance to say hi before. Maybe you could share a little minute or two about how you got involved with this motley crew of optimistic world changers.
Speaker 2:Sure, I'd be happy to Melody, you know, 2000,.
Speaker 2:When two crazy preachers, john Yomassu and Tom Berlin, came up with this idea of starting an orphanage in Sierra Leone, I was one of the congregation who said we're doing what where?
Speaker 2:I was one of the congregation who said we're doing what where they made the case for it, and I've been a huge supporter and donor to the effort ever since. Quite a few years back now. I can't remember how many, but I made my first trip to Sierra Leone and you know fair warning to any of you out there listening to this Once you've gone there and seen the need and seen the work that Helping Children Worldwide does, it kind of submets your commitment to the sustainment of this initiative. And because of that, I think, is when somebody approached me and asked me to join the board, I said absolutely, be happy to, and became chair a couple of years ago, and I could not be prouder of this Motley crew than of any organization I've ever been associated with. It's just fantastic people doing amazing work and I'm just proud to be part of it. So thanks for having me today and I look forward to the conversation.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, rick. We will talk some more about your experience in Sierra Leone in October of this year and what excites you about what we're doing next and where you see the mission in 2025 and the future, but we'll do that later. Optimistic Voices is not usually focused on helping children worldwide's impact from our other programs. It is one of the ways we make an impact. We bring the voices of important thought leaders to our listeners and since this episode is about the other things we do to make an impact and how that's going for us, I think we should catch our listeners up on what happened after our 2022 end of year episode, our listeners up on what happened after our 2022 end of year episode. This is where we shared with our listeners that we were going to be taking some enormous leaps to get to where we are and where we wanted to be at this point and, honestly, I'm still catching my breath from some of those fantastical gymnastics you all put me through. But we got to the other side of almost everything we suggested doing two years ago and so well. I'm just going to cheat again, because there's a synopsis of the progress that Helping Children Worldwide made put out every year, and I've linked the whole thing in our show notes and on our website. But this is a listening audience, so telling you where to go find it isn't going to be very helpful. I'm going to just pull up page 22 of the HCW magazine and here's a brief list of the impacts that we made in the first year of that transition to pursue more opportunities to network, collaborate and empower local organizations to operate, rather than directly managing them, even with respect to our strategies for providing financial aid. Our allied organization, the Child Reintegration Center, served 1,600 children in 429 families an additional 1,409 children because the TCM that's, our transition coaching and mentoring department extended their work to 80 organizations and 25 residential care institutions in Sierra Leone and three other countries and mentored eight of them in transition, conducting 30 workshops and monthly televised events and overseeing the reintegration of 81 children.
Speaker 1:Mercy Hospital, another one of our allied, treated over 13,000 adult and child patients and improved services that are available nowhere else in the country. 8,000 mothers, infants and children received medical outreach services in 45 impoverished communities through mobile clinics. 200 malnourished babies benefited from nutrition services in rural Sierra Leone. 190 babies were delivered safely at Mercy Hospital. Midwives and maternal health specialists are together from global health members collaborated on good birth practices for tens of thousands of maternity and obstetric patients. Our Together for Global Health Coalition expanded held an international conference in Washington DC, provided systems improvement, support for health services for children and families in 31 countries on three continents. Three rural villages partnered with HCW, mercy and CRC to create a family resiliency plan and network in their community, impacting 2,650 villagers. A network of international teachers collaborated on a teacher training curriculum to train 100 teachers and impact 3,500 students in Sierra Leone. That was a lot.
Speaker 1:Honestly, I don't want you to think that's the last word these people will have on the topic. In fact, laura, let me tap you first. Since you've been with the organization the longest. Can you talk about the progress that's been made since 2022? The longest?
Speaker 5:Can you talk about the progress that's been made since 2022? I love that. The request is can you tell us what we've done since 2022, but in as few words as possible? So let me try to tackle that. This is, honestly, feedback. I get all the time.
Speaker 5:So I think, like a lot of nonprofits that are in the same spaces that we occupy all over the world, we move so fast that it's really hard to remember where we were, even a month ago, and for me anyway, but, as you pointed out, I'm with the organization the longest, so maybe that's an age thing. Let me try some broad strokes. So in early 2023, 2023 was a huge travel year for HCW. Obviously, we travel often to Sierra Leone, but 2023 had us in a lot of new places. Traveled right at the beginning of the year to Kenya with our friends from Church of the Resurrection to see some programs there. An orphanage there sorry, that's trying to embark on transition programs there. An orphanage there sorry, that's trying to embark on transition. We visited a Youth Empower initiative that has given us some ideas and informed and impacted how we're thinking about development and capacity building with allies on the ground in the global south, and I think that trip underscored the direction that we've been moving in to focus more on empowerment local empowerment, both financial and personal, for families and communities, but I'll talk more about that later. Let's see after that.
Speaker 5:Melody, I think you and I and our film crew of two and our two stars, george and David, traveled to Mozambique and there, in spite of breaking my foot, on the first day of a three-week film capture trip, we spent time capturing film for the story we're calling Firmly Rooted, which is our documentary about how two social workers and local leaders from Sierra Leone are traveling all over the continent of Africa to show how challenging and critical the work to transition orphanages to family care models is and how important it is to do it, even though it's super hard.
Speaker 5:We watched them and captured them on film, talking with United Methodist bishops from all over Africa about how family is the root of every child's future. And then we watched them and filmed them, meeting with social workers and orphanage directors and others about the importance of transition, the difficulties of transition and how it has to be done well, because kids' lives are at stake. And seeing all that being captured on film was just a really amazing experience personally. Plus, you haven't lived until you've watched the filmmakers put a drone up in the sky and an entire village comes out of run to see what that thing is and to get on camera.
Speaker 5:Just some really fun things and then in July, we took that same crew to Sierra Leone to capture the footage there. So that was amazing. We've added a ton of conferences this year. We, of course, went back to CAFO Summit, as we have every year since 2019. We always attend, we always present, and this year we attended a couple new conferences. Yaz attended a conference in July, represented HCW at the ICAR 8 conference. This is typically a conference that's centered around international adoption, but they've kind of widened their sphere and included us in those conversations and the work that we do, and before that she ran Rising Tides. Yaz, do you want to talk about Rising Tides for a second? Sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I'd love to talk about both of those conferences. So our Together for Global Health network meets monthly on Zoom to discuss specific global health and humanitarian topics. We usually cover one topic every meeting and this virtual format accommodates our diverse membership that's spread across probably four or five different time zones. But we know that there's a great value to in-person interactions, to foster deeper connections and encourage collaborative discussions that are just not possible to have over a Zoom meeting. So to facilitate this, we organized an in-person gathering to bring together, for global health, members who shared a similar interest, which enabled them to be able to share ideas and insights in this more immersive setting have those hallway conversations, as they're called and to meet in smaller groups with people that shared our interest. So last March we hosted our annual Rising Tides Conference. We held it in DC at the United Methodist Building right next to the Capitol, and the theme was Together for Global Health. So it was a really powerful two days. It allowed global health professionals to connect, to learn, to inspire change, and it was a small group there was about 40 of us but because of that it was a more intimate space and it led this really passionate group to be able to talk more to address global health challenges. We know that by fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing, this conference really empowered people to be re-energized in the work that they do and get some new ideas on how to impact the lives of vulnerable communities. So that's Rising Tides.
Speaker 3:This year we also expanded our connections in child welfare by attending the ICAR conference, as Laura was telling you, the International Conference on Adoption Research.
Speaker 3:It was in Minneapolis, minnesota, this year and for a long time it's been this really vital platform for researchers and even adopted persons to share their knowledge and experience around adoption.
Speaker 3:But in the last few years this conference has really broadened its scope to encompass the issue of caring for children separated from families globally. So not just the issues of domestic or international adoption, but encompassing all of the issues that lead to children being separated from families in the first place and what the impact of those experiences are. As you guys probably know, intercountry adoption has really been in decline over the last couple of years and there's this really large global movement that we've been a part of to close orphanages and prioritize family reunification or domestic fostering to children in need and so being on the forefront of this movement, advocating for these solutions that keep children connected to their families and communities. We were actually able to co-present a research project done by Dr Sarah Neville on the impact of the attachment theory workshop hosted by the CRC, which helped show people that are skeptical about the domestic adoption and family reunification space how it can be done well and how children can thrive in those spaces.
Speaker 5:I think entering into these conversations and entering into a new conversation, into a new space, is super exciting and seeing how the work that we support of our allies in Sierra Leone is now intersecting and into this international adoption space is really interesting to watch. As I said, we went to CAFO this year. We always go to CAFO, but this year we actually brought two folks with us. We brought George Kulanda, who is the Senior Case Manager at the Child Reintegration Center in Bow, and David Musa, who's the Head of the Transition Coaching and Mentoring Department. They joined us at CAFO this year. This was their first time in the United States. It was their first time at CAFO, which drew its largest crowd ever in the history of Summit. Over 2,500 people were in attendance, so you can imagine how overwhelming that probably was for the two of them. But not only did they come and attend CAFO as participants, they presented with us at CAFO.
Speaker 5:George and Dr Sarah, who Yaz mentioned and I presented at a research symposium on the CRC's Family Strengthening Workshop curriculum and the research that Sarah drew out of that, and that was to an audience of 200 people in person but over a thousand people online. I think that was George's first time presenting at an international conference and that was quite an audience that he was presenting to. It was a thrill to be presenting alongside him and have him share his expertise. And then later on in the week we presented a kind of panel conversation. George, david Melody and I presented on the nature and evolution of our working relationship between HCW and our allies in Sierra Leone, specifically the Child Reintegration Center, and how that balance of leadership and power it has been shifting more and more toward our Global South colleagues.
Speaker 5:And honestly, one of the best moments for me at CAFO was we weren't on the ground 24 hours before people that I've known for years and met at CAFO for years were tapping me on the shoulder and saying to me hey, where are George and David? We want to talk to them. So that was just a really amazing moment for me. So another conference that Yaz and I attended this year that's completely new to us and we attended just as participants was DevEx World, held in Washington DC just about a week before our recent presidential election, for our recent presidential election, and this gave us a fascinating, if somewhat sobering insight into the worlds of foreign policy and foreign aid as they stand right now, or as they stood. As I say, one week before the election and sort of watching that and seeing how these foreign policy folks and World Bank folks are seeing the trends of foreign aid was pretty eye-opening. Yasmin, did you say something?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:We really got to see our position within the global landscape, thinking of the large bilateral organizations like USAID and the World Bank and the UN all those big players in the game of international development and then trying to see where we stood in that space.
Speaker 3:And it actually was a really good time for us to do that, because earlier this year we took some time to step back and really define our purpose within the landscape of international development and how we're going to accomplish it.
Speaker 3:Helping Children Worldwide started its mission because God calls us to care for vulnerable people and children are especially vulnerable to harm. Our model for that has evolved beyond caring for individual children to influencing a social system around which a child lives, and the first layer of that is, of course, the family that the child lives in and the work that the ZRC does to provide tools that family needs to be strong so they can care for children. The next layer is the community, which includes social workers, pastors and medical professionals in the community and our work with community infrastructure projects and supporting those kinds of community resources. The next layer is institutions in the community like churches or other NGOs that can work together to take care of different aspects of a child's life. And then we also influence entire social systems by our sharing of impact stories and conducting research, like we were talking about earlier, sharing data across multiple platforms and engaging with other organizations at the NGO level, like we're doing at DevEx.
Speaker 4:Yeah, building on that, yes, and HSDM has continued to make progress.
Speaker 4:And in that instance of that African proverb that says if you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together. So, at Happy Children Worldwide, we are committed to going forward together. So, as Trusted Allies, we are committed to equipping local leaders and organizations with the tools and resources and authority they need so that they can continue to thrive independently. Our evolving role emphasizes this collaborative support, ensuring that autonomy and resilience will remain central to everything we do. This is a strategy that aligns our resources and energy where they are most effective, ensuring that we remain steadfast in our commitment to creating that lasting and meaningful change, to creating that lasting and meaningful change. So, together, in mission with you and our mission allies across the globe, we continue to demonstrate our true collaborative efforts. We can have locally driven solutions to continue to take the lead to transform outcomes for communities everywhere. So, yas, can you elaborate a little bit on how this strength of helping children will have fit us into even the global health space?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'd be happy to. So you know, as NAB said, I think a key strength of helping children worldwide is our ability to collaborate effectively with other organizations and, to put it simply, I like to call it playing well with others. I like to call it playing well with others. We are an organization that embraces partnerships and we're not afraid to share knowledge and resources so that we can maximize our impact. We know that collaborating with organizations that have specific expertise in other regions or other areas of focus, then we can leverage our collective strengths and address complex challenges more effectively. We know that, working together, we can achieve greater results and make a more significant difference in the lives of children worldwide, and a great example of this is in our Together for Global Health work. So, growing out of our Together for Global Health group, we decided to embark on this maternal health mission. So, for those of you who don't know, or those of you who have not listened to my two favorite podcast episodes of the year, our maternal health mission is an ongoing project to tackle maternal and child mortality through health system strengthening. So in January of this year, 2024, we trained 98 midwives to be equipped to perform emergency and obstetric and newborn procedures at their local facilities. And this project is really an exceptional step in the right direction for our organization. First, because, training midwives to effectively handle emergencies at their facilities, we are not only improving immediate outcomes for mothers and babies, but also strengthening the overall health system that supports them, the most vulnerable group within a healthcare system. This approach also fosters sustainable healthcare solutions and empowers local healthcare providers beyond the walls of Mercy Hospital, although Mercy was one of our participants.
Speaker 3:But I think one of the most remarkable parts of this is that the success of this project is a testament to the impact of collaborative endeavors.
Speaker 3:Although we were kind of one of the rallying points of this, there were at least six organizations three kind of in our core group and then expanding out to six that collaborated to do this, and each of those six organizations reached out to others to get supplies and equipment, so about 19 organizations all together came together to make this possible. None of the single organizations, ourselves included, would have been able to accomplish this because not everyone had the skills, the funding, the capacity to achieve it at the scale of 100 midwives like we did. But we pooled our resources, our expertise, we pooled our connections and we were able to achieve more than we ever would have been able to do on our own. We learned a lot from this project, though, about how to do this well, and are again trying to share that knowledge with others, so we've been doing some communication with other networks that do work with midwives, like the Good Birth Network, midwives at the Edges, and even did a presentation for the Virtual International Day of the Midwife, so we can even share our collaborative efforts.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think our ability as an organization to play well with others is a core strength, but I honestly think it's that without it, I'm not sure how any of this gets done. So my word for this year was uncharted, and I think it became HCW's word as well, and having a year that feels uncharted, where everything seems uncharted, has been extraordinarily good and extraordinarily challenging in a lot of ways, in a lot of difficult ways. We've been looking, as I've been thinking, about Rising Tides 2025, I've been thinking about futures planning and some of the things that we learned at DevEx, and one of the things we know about the future is that it's unknown, but we act as if we know where we're headed anyway. We keep doing the things even though we don't really know what the future has in store for us, and the truth is we do know a little bit about the future.
Speaker 5:But one of the lessons that I came away from DevX with is that it's important to forecast, but it's easier to forecast if you're collaborating with others. That collaboration helps with forecasting and forecasting helps with collaboration, and so I still think that that collaboration helps with forecasting and forecasting helps with collaboration, and so I still think that that collaboration and our ethic around. That is really, really important, and our uncharted territory this year has led us to really continue more and more to let go of the lead and step into much more supporting roles that let our allies in the South do some of the forecasting and do some of the navigating into the future, getting ourselves out of the driver's seat.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, laura. That made me think of all of our talk about collaboration and working together. Makes me think of the James 127 study that was published this year. So James 127 is the verse about widows and orphans, and as a part of the research that we did on God's call to care for widows and orphans, we were looking at some of the verses in the Old Testament, and in Old Testament law it specified that the Israelites were supposed to harvest their fields one time and whatever was left over they were supposed to leave for widows and orphans and foreigners to be able to harvest to feed themselves.
Speaker 3:So God specified that the Israelites had this obligation to care for these people, but his call was not for them to harvest all the grain and then give some to the widows. His command was for them to be able to collaborate together on the same project of harvesting the wheat, and so it's striking this balance between support and dignifying independence. So the Israelites had an obligation to leave food in the fields and the widows also had to step up and do their part and take care of themselves. And this is really what dignifying partnerships look like with people who come from different economic, social and cultural backgrounds. It's not a handout, it's not doing everything for them, but making it possible for organizations to do their best and bring their skills and work together to take care of our common issues.
Speaker 1:Thank you, yas. I always like the way that you bring us back to our root, our own perspective of scripture and Christian perspective on why we do this work. But I want to say hey, laura, I have been sitting on my microphone not to make any, not make any remarks because I got pretty excited as you were talking about George and David from the CRC presenting for the first time in the global stage. At that exact moment it occurred to me that this experience is what really propelled me forward in my commitment to balance power between the global South and the global North. I saw it first at the GBGM conference with all of the African bishops there in Mozambique, and what an impact it had for them to be hearing from Africans two Africans talking about this work. And then at the Christian Alliance for Orphans, I saw that same phenomenon repeated.
Speaker 1:I think it's what rises to the top for me when I think about our mission anchors. And then the work we're doing locally in the Strong Family for Every Child initiative is a close second which that James 127 study. It comes out of that work. We have five mission anchors being financially healthy, providing global leadership, linking resources to needs, focusing on family and community and equipping and empowering local ownership. Hey, rick, I hate to put you on the spot since you're responsible for my performance reviews, but from a board perspective, what work do you see will be most important?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question, Melody, and I appreciate you putting that on the table because, excuse me, I do think this coming year is going to be a challenge for HCW in new ways.
Speaker 2:We have even gone so far in our relationships with many of our colleagues in changing our terminology Instead of talking about partnerships, we now talk about alliances.
Speaker 2:And there's a reason for that, and the reason is that we realize that it's not a good policy for us to be in the middle of day-to-day operations in some place that's 6,000 miles away and how many time zones and how many time zones. And unfortunately, when we find ourselves in that position, we tend to impose a particularly Western view of how things could and should be done, and oftentimes that comes across as the right way to do something no-transcript. Our role is going to be one of supporting, consulting, offering expertise, offering insight, and that's going to require an adjustment on our part, as well as an adjustment on the part of our alliances, who have been used to us working differently. We've got some significant work to do in how we back out of that decision process and allowing the people who are on the job, on the ground, doing the work, to make the decisions, because they're the ones who most best know what needs to be done, not us on the other side of the ocean here.
Speaker 5:So for me, 2025 is going to be a year of celebration the 25 years of HCW in existence and transformation, both in how we work with our alliances and our collaborative partners that we've been talking in here. Rick, I could not agree with you more. I think you know these anchors have been our guiding anchors for a while now, but I think this year for me, saw two of those anchors kind of come together. I'm going to highlight the one on global leadership and the one on equipping and empowering global leaders to shift the balance of power and create a more sustainable impact, and just to kind of go back to Summit again as an example of where I saw that play out in a way that I think was so exciting for me. Every time I've been at Summit and in some of these other international conference spaces, there's usually a room full of people from the Global North who look a lot like me, who talk about how important it is for us to get the lead, the voices of leaders from the Global South, into these conversations, into these discussions. We need to have their perspective and we just frankly, haven't done a great job of doing that. We just haven't. And so having these two CRC staff travel to summit not just as attendees but as presenters and have their voices mic'd and projected out into a room full of people. I think is just the very beginning of where not just HCW should be heading, but where all of NGOs like ours should be heading.
Speaker 5:One of my favorite summit moments was David Moussa went off to attend a session on his own. I'm not sure if George went with him or not, but he went to attend a session and when he came back I said to him well, how was it? You know, what did you think? And he thought for a really long time which is something he does and then he said these people have a lot to learn from us and he's right those of us that are experts here in the global North. You get to go to summit, you get to go to rising tides and I car CCI, h um, dev X, world Um. We've even spoken at UN uh convention meetings and things like that. Convention meetings and things like that. We have a lot to learn from our colleagues in the global South. A lot more listening to do and a lot less talking to do.
Speaker 5:Two of the coolest things that I get to do in my role in global advocacy for HCW is that I sort of represent two secretariat positions that HTW has taken on as an organization and those secretariat positions allow us to be of service, but not necessarily in leadership, which has been an interesting and kind of rewarding evolution for me from the days when we were here and when we here in the US were making decisions down to the smallest detail about a program as you're saying, rick that was 6,000 miles away on another continent. Two of my favorite are HCW sits as a secretariat for the Sierra Leone Coalition for Family Care and it's one of my favorite roles, not just because all I do is run the Zoom meeting and take notes and find resources the coalition asks me to go out and find but I get to witness as four leading child welfare organizations in Sierra Leone that include the CRC engage their government and their ministries to share knowledge and best practices and find ways to work together to connect their work to their goals for national and regional care reform for children. Children who have lived experience of residential care at three of these organizations, including the CRC, were able this year to participate in the development of a policy document for the United Nations through an effort of the UN Human Rights Council by participating in a UN consultation. So a child of the CRC who has lived experience of residential care sat in a room on a Zoom with the support of a couple of case managers and offered his insight into what he believes children like him have a right to in terms of growing up in a family. That is amazing and that that should be happening.
Speaker 5:The other secretariat role I get to do is I serve as the secretariat for the United Methodist Church's education and advocacy campaign called A Strong Family for Every Child. A Strong Family offers free resources that help churches in the UMC and, frankly, others as well to learn more about how they can help strengthen families in their congregations, communities, nations and the world. And I just get to be the girl in the wings.
Speaker 4:Yeah, one of our strategic anchors focuses on empowering and equipping local ownerships.
Speaker 4:We said right there, and we are making significant progress in this area, as Rick mentioned and Laura is talking about this and Melody is talking we are all talking about this same area here.
Speaker 4:So, as the mission of helping children worldwide continues to evolve, so also do our organizational practices, because this is how it works, right, what we say, how they feel about what we say and what they think about it, what we do. So it's very, very critical when it comes to changing our missions, very critical when it comes to changing our missions. We have taken many full steps to strengthen transformative alliances with our global sub-allies, including the Sierra Leone United Methodist Church and the program leaders of the CLC and Massive Hospital. By actively transforming decision-making and responsibility to local leaders those closer to the problem we are laying the foundation for our global sub-allies to become empowered hosts of an expanding network of mission partners. This approach ensures sustainable impact and reinforces our shared mission to create lasting change. It is an approach that truly honors local insight and experience, allowing our allies to be more fully driven into this mission that we do together.
Speaker 3:Yeah, nabs, I completely agree. A great example of this is how Mercy Hospital is growing. So Mercy is really reaching out and trying new things and managing them all on their own. Last year they pursued some grants to get a new x-ray machine and lab equipment so that they can treat more patients and do more sophisticated diagnostics and with that for the non-destitute patients, be able to raise more income to support the sustainability of the hospital. And for the past few years we have been sending mission teams to Sierra Leone to provide technical advice on chronic and non-communicable diseases like diabetes and hypertension, and through that support Mercy Hospital has gotten training on how to recognize and provide patient education for these conditions. And they're beginning to see an increasingly larger number of cases of patients with diabetes and hypertension. And as they begin to see more of these patients coming in, they realize that even more need for this education for healthcare workers to diagnose and treat these conditions and to continue to screen in the community as they're a rising prevalence. So they've continued to ask us to send mission teams for that training and support.
Speaker 3:Now, chronic disease is not a focus of helping children worldwide. Our focus has always been on maternal and child health, but that focus also includes health system strengthening, and in supporting Mercy Hospitals in this project that they want to pursue, we're able to strengthen the overall health system, providing advice and support that they need. So in this diabetes project they've been working on, we've helped them grow into this idea that aligns with their interests. So they've sought out other organizations to partner with, including Insulin for Life, and we were able to help them with some of the application and just some of the stuff involving getting the resources and providing expertise on how to do this. But the ownership and management of this project has remained firmly in their hands, and so we've shifted from soliciting all the support on our own and saying, don't you think it's a good idea to do this, to a more supportive and empowering role, strengthening our relationship with our allies, allowing them to grow on their own and contributing to the long term sustainability of the work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, yaz. I too am really excited to see how Mercy is stepping into ownership of its programs and our role in supporting that. Maybe, rick, maybe you'd like to weigh in on the reasons we're changing our description of our relationship from partnership to alliance and what that change means to you. I know we're still stumbling over the change in language, but I'm wondering if you can explain to our audience why we think this is an essential language change we need to make?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I agree with you, melody. I think this is incredibly important for us, but also for any organizations who do this kind of work internationally or in any collaborative relationship, relationship as partnerships. We realize that our mental model for that word includes some degree of ownership, which I think all of us would agree. When we talk about we are entering into a partnership, we feel some part of that ownership of that mission or the work or whatever it is is going to be done. What we've realized is that when that is our mental model, we feel obligated, entitled, able even to step in and say this is what you should do, this is how it should work, this is the work that should happen next. Here's why we do it that way, as opposed to in an alliance. We don't own the mission or the work. Rather, we are supporting the mission and work, and so the big change is we're no longer decision makers, we're no longer contributing to the decisions. We're offering insight, opinions, consultation. We still offer support and resources and capacity building Absolutely, but it's important that we go back to this basic foundation realization that the work is best done by the people on the ground and not driven by those of us who are in other places trying to do good things and sometimes becoming the problems ourselves because of the way we intervene in the work.
Speaker 2:So this transition is one that we're working with, with our collaborative relationships now, and we are working on ourselves this year in understanding how to move towards this notion of more empowerment and away from being actively involved in operations, day-to-day activities, decision-making that we've done in the past. I think it's going to be a real challenge. It's going to take some time because these are habits we've built up over the years and we're going to have to break some of those habits.
Speaker 3:Yeah, rick, I completely agree with that. We even talked about this in our episode two years ago our shift to encouraging local ownership and decision making, stepping away from a direct management role and positioning ourselves as funders and advisors and how we see that playing out is that funders you know, we're the ones who raise the support for the projects that they do that align with our mission and that means that we still have an expectation of accountability and transparency, but the ownership lies with them in what they do and what they pursue. And as technical advisors, our role is to provide resources that they need to improve and expand their work, whether that means the mission teams that we send with skills to support them. Laura talked earlier about doing research for the coalition, sharing information from other organizations that we think would benefit them, or just having weekly meetings to discuss problems and new ideas. Both of these roles don't come without challenges.
Speaker 3:Our partners sometimes struggle with the management aspects because they're so skilled at the people aspects and for so long, as Rick said, you know, we held on to managing those things, and so we have to help support them in developing their own management procedures and with determining what sort of data they want to gather, thinking about it from a monitoring and evaluation perspective, so that we can.
Speaker 3:It aligns with both the priorities of us and the priorities of them, and Rick hit it right on the spot when it comes to technical advising, it's really easy to try and jump back in and solve all of the problems on our own, insisting on our way of doing things, and a lesson that I think we're still trying to learn with that is giving our allies the space to try to succeed and sometimes to fail.
Speaker 3:I want to use a metaphor, but I want to make sure it's conveyed that I'm not trying to infantilize our allies in Sierra Leone, but think about a story of a child riding a bicycle. You know, you help them, you train them and then eventually they go out on their own, and then sometimes they fall off the bicycle and instead of jumping in and trying to pick them up, you wait and give them the opportunity to do it themselves. So our partners need opportunities to experiment, make mistakes, ultimately develop their own solutions. Nonprofits in general automatically feel like they don't have the ability to fail sometimes, and this causes a reluctance to innovate, and so by embracing this risk of trying on their own, supporting their experimentation, we can foster a culture of innovation and long-term impact. Over the past couple of years, our goal has been to let them build it on their own, avoid stepping in, and to hear what they are asking for us in terms of help and advice, rather than imposing it ourselves.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I just want to build off of your bike riding metaphor a little bit because, again, this is another lesson. I kind of got at DevEx when we were at DevEx together and we were talking about something that nonprofits don't often get the opportunity to do, that for profits do, and that is the opportunity to try things and fail. That if you're going to innovate, if you're going to grow, if you're going to move forward as an organization, you need the opportunity to try things and fail and then learn from that failure and grow from that. And so you know, part of allyship that's different than partnership is stepping back enough so that our allies on the ground that are doing the actual, real work have the space they need to try some things and see what happens and learn from what happens, totally agree.
Speaker 1:I'm going to introduce another perspective. We operate from three core values radical honesty, radical courage and radical collaboration. Just being radically honest, an imbalanced power dynamic in an allyship cuts two ways. It creates a dependency that hobbles both sides of the equation.
Speaker 1:Honestly, when I review financial reports from allied programs that we are supporting financially, all I'm looking for is transparency and accurate information about past expenditures and outcomes. I'm just looking for the data on what happened, but sometimes those budget to actual reports look more like a demand for more funding to me, and I can only imagine what would happen if my donor appeal was you gave us money and we used it, and when it ran out, we adjusted your contribution, so now you have to give us more money. I don't think that would go down very well. Sure, it would make the 2025 revenue plan pretty simple for you, nabs. Seriously, though, the reason to balance power is that the best solutions do come from those closest to the problems. You just can't plan, manage or adjust from halfway around the world to problems you cannot begin to fully understand, just like my colleagues have said, and that's what we're trying to do is just get the solutions in the hands of the people who can actually make them consistent and viable.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thank you, melinda. That's what I said. I mean, in trying to make all the decisions on the ground, it poses a lot of threats really to move into a more supportive, capacity building role we are in. By facilitating clear roles and responsibilities, we are creating a space where local insight from the dynamics, local ownership and responsibility can continue to play a critical role in informing every phase of the mission, from planning to execution, ensuring true, truly localized solutions can address the unique challenges those people are facing. They know their situations better than we do. So involving them in this work and helping them take that leadership role, we can start seeing significant changes, and we believe this is very critical to creating the world we all want.
Speaker 1:Thank you, nabs. We've been talking for a while now, so we're going to take a little break. We invite you to return for the second half of our episode, the Optimistic Voices Retrospective on Helping Children Worldwide, and, in the meantime, 30-second dance party Outro Music.
