EChO
will be partnering with
Love without Boundaries!
|
Greetings!
We have wonderful news that we wanted to share with you. EChO will be partnering with another non-profit that is helping orphans in China. Love Without Boundaries is an excellent organization with a great reputation, and a solid commitment and heart for Chinese orphans. This is really an exciting step for us. As you know, we have been wanting to expand our reach and start additional schools for special needs orphans, but we didn't quite have the infrastructure within China to be able to do this. Creating this would have cost more money than what we have.
Love Without Boundaries (LWB) has the needed infrastructure within China and the relationships with over 200 orphanages throughout every province in China to truly help orphans. They are one of the most respected non-profits in China. They assist in education, nutrition, medical needs, foster care and adoption. Please visit their website at Love without Boundaries to learn more about all that they do.
Because of our desire to help more children, our board decided to reach out to Love Without Boundaries and to inquire if we could partner with them. LWB's Executive Director Amy Eldridge has welcomed us, and we both look forward to a long and fruitful partnership. Love Without Boundaries has actually been wanting to go deeper into this area of service to special needs orphans because of the increasing number of them and because, simply, these children have such high needs, with so little hope.
LWB is truly excited about their partnership with us in how we can share our knowledge of special needs instruction with them. As a country, the Chinese are shifting in their culture to being accepting of adoption within its borders, but their acceptance of those with special needs and disabilities still has a long way to go.
EChO will continue to assist orphans with special needs who don't receive any assistance from the regular education model in China. The Chinese government, through its Civil Affairs Department, is quite pleased with the assistance of non-profit organizations into special education for orphans. They have agreed to a three year partnership for each school that is created, and after three years will take over the financial payments to keep any schools going that are created by EChO, in partnership with Love Without Boundaries.
We have reached this three-year mark in helping the 40 students in our Kaifeng School. At this point, the Civil Affairs Department is ready to step in and take over financing the school in Kaifeng, and we are ready to take our support and your sponsorship dollars and to start another school within another orphanage.
We want to ask you to continue to stand side by side with us as we make this transition, and ask that you continue to send in your monthly or annual contributions as we transfer these donations to our next school. We suspended accepting donations a few months ago when we discovered that our time with Kaifeng had been reached, and while we reached out to LWB and figured out how we could be the most effective in the future.
It is sad to say good-bye to our Kaifeng School. And yet, the good news is, Love Without Boundaries has a foster care program with the Kaifeng Orphanage and will still keep tabs on these special children.
As a board, we have been waiting upon the recommendations of Love Without Boundaries as to EChO's options for our next school. We have four possible locations, where they know the orphanage directors well, and with whom they have integrity and strict accountability with your donations.
Love Without Boundaries has created a model where all of their special education teachers go through specific training before they can teach. The next teacher training will be July 16th - 20th. After new teachers are trained, we plan to open our next school, probably in the fall.
As you can sense, we are excited about this new direction. We hope that you will continue to partner with us. We will move forward in accepting your donations, and if you choose to not to join us in this next phase of our journey, we understand. All general donations will go towards the start-up costs of our new school.
Thank you! We are really excited about this partnership, but more importantly, we want to continue helping these precious children.
Sincerely,
EChO Board of Directors
Robert Tadjiki
Jenny Murphy
John Howes
|
PO Box 8630
Bend, Oregon 97708
Education for Chinese Orphans - EChO
541-610-6967
www.echoinchina.org
|
