Challenges
Our Challenges
In the communities we serve, children are growing up in the top 10% of the social deprivation indices. In one of our communities, child poverty is at 40%. Sadly, life expectancy can be up to 10% lower than in the more affluent areas of the city. In these areas, long term education, employment and life chances for children are significantly poorer.
Many children we work with lack access to safe outdoor spaces and quality education. Support services are increasingly stretched and petty crime, broken homes, and substance abuse are prevalent. This situation is unacceptable. This means hundreds of children in some cities are growing up without enjoying their childhood.
The whole generation needs to know they are special and loved, to have an identity and feel a sense of belonging in God and the wider family. We do what we do because we believe there is hope for transformation, safety and love available for every family in Ghana.
We now run shelter homes, schools and a reasonable mess that helps such needy young people. We also have our helpline offices spread throughout the country so one can approach us anytime they need help.
Committment
As an organization, we believe that a greater diversity of views, skills, and experience would help generate better ideas, and would lead to better decision making.
We are committed to living up to our value of “equity” in our culture, systems and practices; working in an inclusive way as a staff and trusted team to ensure we make progress against our action plan; and tracking, improving and sharing our progress.
We are committed to striving for fair opportunities and outcomes for the people we work with; making an effort to understand and respond to people’s contexts, cultures, and characteristics; funding more individuals and communities experiencing social injustice; giving more long-term funding and support to individuals already under our care that are working to advance social justice; working with partners to identify, fund, and nurture smaller organisations led by racialised people that are working towards our goals; and using our power as benefactors to influence recruitment and governance practice to be more inclusive in sectors (e.g. environment) where the majority of organisations are not ethnically diverse.
How we Work
We want to be innovative in our grant making and to work with our peers to create contemporary philanthropic and benevolent acts that are responsive and flexible.
This means doing things differently and using all our resources to improve our practice. We focus on:
Purposeful and equitable relation
We want to work alongside people and groups we fund, acknowledging their expertise and welcoming their insights, and drawing on them to inform and develop the way we do things.
We use a variety of funding approaches, from support for education and development through to endowments, in response to the needs of the individuals we work with and the conditions they face.
Our objective is to be flexible as possible, and we are extending our commitment to long-term funding and to providing core support which is within our reach.
Non-financial support
We believe we can add value to our grant making and motivate the individual that we fund by providing advice and support from within the Foundation and by including external expertise.
We invest in education and evaluate the means of learning of the people in everything we do. We underpin advocacy and communications to help shift narratives and to add to collective intelligence, and we support skill development and promote capacity in the sectors we fund.
We value networking and relationships, so we support bringing other partners together to work on common agendas to provides a safe and independent space where our partners can reflect and share learning openly.
Partnership and collaboration
To create the change we want to see, it is often effective to work with other groups and organisations.
Accordingly, we actively welcome partnerships with other funders, with central and local partners and other businesses – and build communities of interest in the fields we support.
We encourage those we fund to improve their situations by developing their own path to greatness.
Effective and efficient operations
We want to achieve the greatest possible impact with our resources and set high standards for how we operate. We desire simplicity in all our dealings and we are open to new ways of working to help us achieve that.
We aim to operate a straightforward, and transparent process for those seeking assistance from us, and to manage relationships with funders and individuals we assist. Our commitment to education extends to other areas where necessary.
