The evolution of our alliance with CRC

Not long after the orphanage was established, the Child Rescue Centre (CRC) outgrew the building where it began, serving now over 75 children in residence. The residential program was never all that John Yambasu or his friends at Helping Children Worldwide had envisioned. 

Thinking of ways to reach more children in need, the CRC and HCW leadership agreed that access to education was crucial to ending generational poverty. Since no schooling was provided without cost in Sierra Leone at the time, the poorest families had to often choose between educating or feeding their children the one meal per day they were used to eating. Seeing all the school age children who were not in school, and noting the extremely high illiteracy rates and unemployment rates were continuing to increase after the impact of war, the allies agreed to work together to provide tuition and school supplies to impoverished children. They set about offering enrollment in CRC school support programs to children whose parents were unable to adequately feed or house their children and also send them to school. By 2005, there were as many or more children living outside the residence who were enrolled in the CRC’s child and family support programs, receiving financial assistance, food, healthcare tuition, school fees, uniforms, shoes and school supplies.

From those first 40 children, the CRC grew to include a spectrum of programs serving more than 600 extremely vulnerable children and youth, helping them escape the vicious cycle of poverty and develop their full potential.  Many of the children who had been in residence at CRC had attended college with aid of scholarships from Helping Children Worldwide (HCW) and returned as professionals to run the institutions that had been originally formed to help them.

Beginning in 2016, these care-leavers used their experience and education to transform the work and improve it, advocating for family care over residential placement. On the HCW side, professional staff had been hired, including highly educated program staff who brought best practice standards to their discussions with CRC  and HCW governing boards. With convincing advocacy for transformation on both sides, by 2018, CRC had become a leading edge institution in the care reform movement.  All of the children in residence were living in families, most of them reunited with their own parents, siblings and family. Because of the deep commitment to the welfare of the children in residence, the allies worked together to develop a mindful reintegration process that would prove to result in sustainable reintegrations for the entire family, in addition to addressing child protection issues and the immediate child welfare needs of the children who would be reintegrated.

Once the children were all living in families, some might think the work of the CRC was complete. Some actually suggested as much. But the work did not end there, as the goal was to end the cycle of child poverty, permanently, and to do so by ensuring every child they enrolled in their programs lived with a sense of belonging in safe, loving, and strong families.

With the CRC family support program in the community as their original service model, the allies began to adjust their mode of collaborating, as well as increasingly focused on the best practices that would increase staff professionalism and capacity to provide the services needed to support the empowerment of strong families. Their work focused on building on the unique family strengthening services they had collaborated to develop. In 2020, the Child Reintegration Centre was born from the new vision of the CRC leadership, and not only did CRC transform its work to focus on sustaining families, healing and preventing family separation, it began teaching others about their successes.

Read more about the current work of the CRC and HCW alliance in child welfare here.