We’re proud to announce that TACA, the leading airline of Central America, has donated $25,000 in airfare to Whole Child International for 2008. This will cover most or all of our central American travel for the year, and will significantly reduce the cost of our programming.

Grupo TACA CEO Roberto Kriete and the rest of the rapidly expanding carrier have our sincerest thanks. Their support is making it possible for us to conduct and expand our services while continuing adequate oversight and further maximizing the impact of other donors’ contributions. We know this is just the beginning of a rewarding partnership with TACA Airlines.

All Whole Child International hands were on deck last week as our training process began for the second phase in Nicaragua. On April 16, 17, and 18, Regional Program Manager Gabriela Serrano and Lead Trainer Marta Periera led three days of training at the Nicaraguan government’s PAEBANIC Training Center in Managua. Eighty caregivers attended from the Pajarito Azul, New Life, Arca de Noe, and Todd Anglin children’s homes, each of which had staggered its staff’s training participation schedules over three days to ensure adequate caregivers remained with the children. Read the rest of this entry »

Only a very small number of international aid pilot programs have the privilege of moving into full implementation. We’re happy to be on the fortunate side of this statistic; we can really look toward our expansion into new countries and regions to meet a level of need that is truly global. But it also means we need to scale up our efforts to raise money.

In Nicaragua, the site of our pilot program, we have just completed the initial phase of expansion into four new orphanages, toward our goal of reaching all 85 children’s homes within 10 years. Full caregiver training in those four orphanages begins next week. In El Salvador, we are also poised to begin our work and the ambitious expansion of our program across the country. Whole Child representatives have also just returned from preliminary meetings upon the invitation of the government of one of the largest countries in South America, and the need for our work there is acute.

Our initial successes and our expansive vision have also managed to bring some fortuitous public attention, but our expansion remains limited by the volume of financial resources we receive. We now rely on public funding for all of our income, and our ability to expand beyond the borders of Nicaragua is directly tied to our ability to raise new funds. We hope you will explore these pages fully, and consider helping fund a cost-effective and innovative approach to ending one of the world’s oldest problems — the inability of children’s institutions to meet children’s most basic emotional needs, and the subsequent descent of a child into a cycle of despair that can last for generations.

To help us reach the world’s children, please visit our donation page, and let us know if you would like to help raise money in your community.

Now more than ever, we need and thank you for your support.

Save the date: Friday, April 11. Karen Gordon’s panel address to the Seeds of Compassion gathering will be webcast live at the Seeds of Compassion website. The discussion will take place at Seattle’s Key Arena from 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 PST.

As previously posted, Karen’s panel is called “From Knowledge to Compassion Action: What We All Can Do,” and features His Holiness the Dalai Lama as well as four other pioneers in child development.

We hope you will tune in on Friday. If you can’t make it, we’ll post the permanent link to the archived webcast as soon as it we have it.

Update: The panel turned out to be a beautiful and deeply informative discussion. Seeds of Compassion has made the full two-hour program available in perpetuity on their website; you click the above image or here to reach it directly. Once you’re on the video player, scroll down to the second item, “Friday, April 11, 12:30-2:30pm, From Knowledge to Compassion Action.”

In the meantime, we are now readying a 20-minute excerpt video to post here on the website; we’ll send an announcement when it is ready.

It’s official: Founding Executive Director Karen Gordon is this month’s Glamour Magazine “Hero of the Month”! She can be found on page 54 of the May 2008 issue.

It’s a brief but informative portrait of Karen and her efforts, and we hope it helps attract some of the resources we need to carry on our work in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other countries.

Our favorite quotation: “These days, the kids … even appear taller and stronger. ‘It’s not the diet that changed,’ says Gordon. ‘It’s the environment.’”

Welcome, Glamour readers.

Yesterday Whole Child concluded its three-part Directors’ Training program in Nicaragua, the first of two scheduled this year. These sessions are the initial phase in our interventions in participating orphanages; they will be followed by a planning phase at each institution, and then the onset of the caregiver training and support program.

The administrators of four orphanages attended this three-part program, which took place over two months at the Whole Child house in Managua. The sessions were designed to sensitize them to the services we provide, our expectations of each children’s home, and the child development principles behind everything we do.

The process began in January, when Program Director Diane Harkins and Regional Program Manager Gabriela Serrano began making needs assessments at Managua-area children’s institutions that had been suggested by our partners in the Nicaraguan Ministry of the Family.

Read the rest of this entry »

In February we completed the next big step toward full implementation in Nicaragua. Our new caregiver training team, Sylvia Haro and Marta Pereira, have moved full-time to Managua. Our first expatriate employees, they are replacing our Inaugural Trainers, Consuelo Espinosa and Edilma Serna, who traveled back and forth every month during the pilot year to establish our program and make extraordinary headway with the children and caregivers of the pilot institution.

Their arrival unites the Managua-based project team which includes Program Administrator Mario Bandes and At-Large Coordinator María Soledad Marenco Martinez. The trainers moved into a house in Managua that for now can double as our field office as well as our training center for small groups.

We are doing our best to use practices established by other international NGOs, and making our own along the way. This month the team will be joined by media specialist Nicole Gadaleta. Nicole is generously donating her time to help document our process for international replication and to build our training media library. We’re optimistic that Nicole will be able to help contribute everyday stories that will keep these pages interesting and inform the entire Whole Child community of our observations, challenges, and successes in the field.

Whole Child International’s Founding Executive Director, Karen Gordon, has been invited to speak on a panel with the Dalai Lama and other luminaries in child development.

Called “From Knowledge to Compassion Action: What We All Can Do,” the panel is part of Seeds of Compassion, a five-day event taking place in Seattle April 11-15, 2008.

The program will include a 10-minute video about Whole Child, along with a 20-minute discussion that will put our work into the larger context of the other panelists’ work and beyond. Karen will be in auspicious company: aside from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, her copanelists are Mary Gordon, John Gottman, Roger Weissberg, and Bob Marvin.

Seeds of Compassion, which has emerged as a collaboration between the Kirlin Foundation and the Venerable Tenzin Dhonden, will be an “unprecedented gathering to engage the hearts and minds of our community by highlighting the vision, science, and programs of early social, emotional, and cognitive learning.”

Today in San Salvador, Founding Executive Director Karen Gordon signed a formal agreement with the government of El Salvador. The agreement is years in the making, and clears the way for us to begin work in that country’s 33 children’s institutions.

A formal signing ceremony will be held in April with the First Lady of El Salvador, and we expect to begin work immediately thereafter in three orphanages in San Salvador. Prospective Caregiver Trainers are encouraged to visit our employment page, and donors wishing to specifically support our work in El Salvador can contact us through the giving page. Donors based in El Salvador may wish to contact the San Salvador office directly.

A feature on Whole Child International has appeared in this month’s Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest. Welcome to all our new Canadian readers — we hope you’ll explore the above links and that all readers will consider supporting our work. We are beginning full implementation this month and new countries of service are right around the corner, so new sources of income have never been more crucial.

Please continue to check this page for up-to-the-minute news on progress. There will be much to discuss, both in Nicaragua and beyond.

Update: this article is a “digest” of the Forbes Magazine article on our work last year. Please see our Press page for further information. We’ll put a direct link to the Reader’s Digest website should a copy become available.