Hi Everyone.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to CameroonONE’s proposal last month. As previously discussed, CameroonONE is a 501c3 registered charity organization that sponsors orphaned children in the Republic of Cameroon. The children in our program have been transitioned to family care, which means that they have been removed from their villages' overcrowded and under-resourced orphanages and placed in the households of extended family members in their communities of birth. We then sponsor all education and health needs and help to strengthen the family unit so that they are able to provide for their own nieces and nephews. The basic needs for our children are about $300 per student per year.
Being able to partner with BiblePay would be very exciting for CameroonONE. As an organization, we are responsible for the children in our program and their host families. Our ongoing operations in the two communities that we serve are only possible because of the generosity of good-natured individuals and communities like BiblePay. Your contribution this year will do some real good in the region and we thank the BiblePay community for considering us as one of your beneficiaries!
By international laws and standards, orphaned children are supposed to be reunited with family members when applicable. If there are no family members capable of raising them, then they should be placed within willing homes within their community of birth. In the event that all these options are exhausted, then international adoption is a very welcome and necessary option. That said, these standards are routinely ignored or flouted around the world. CameroonONE’s mission is to promote these expectations of international law; we recognize the reasons why they initially became standards- to keep the family together and strengthen the ties of community, to maintain cultural traditions and a bond between the citizen and one’s heritage, and to protect villages from losing future generations and the benefits of their creativity and productivity. Orphanages serve an important purpose for the parentless children of this world, but they should be reserved for the worst cases- a space for those without other options. The gap that CameroonONE addresses is to relieve the overcrowded and underfunded orphanages of the children who do not belong in them, while simultaneously reuniting the family by placing children in the households of surviving family members and ensuring their educations and healthy lives and values. CameroonONE assumes the role of foster care in a region that does not have the systems in place to care for all of the parentless children and BiblePay's support will strengthen our operations in Mankon and Belo, Cameroon by helping to provide an education, health care, and caretaker support for the children in our program and their guardians.
CameroonONE has 84 children in our program. We have impacted their lives; we impact their host families (with an average family size of 6) by providing caretaker support and reuniting them with their nieces and nephews; we impact the communities’ orphanages by alleviating them of unnecessary cases and relaxing their resource strain (which creates a better life for those still in their care); we provide funding for the schools that would be otherwise unavailable and this impacts both faculty and students; our bee farming projects provide jobs for the community and better yields for neighboring farmers (as well as helping to battle the decline of global bee populations); and by vaccinating our students and teaching about health standards, we have impacted an unknown amount of people by preventing the spread of infection and disease.
A $4000 donation from BiblePay will provide funding for 14 of the children in our program for their educations, health needs, living expenses, and caretaker support for this year. This includes PTA fees to the schools, text and exercise books, school uniforms and shoes, and seeds and other material goods for the families.
Our charity is being endorsed by BiblePay and Rob and Jaap have reviewed our financials and are very supportive of our orphan-care approach and family-preservation practices. We will be able to introduce you to the students that you are sponsoring through email and work to create an API that will allow everyone to interact with them. We look forward to our partnership with BiblePay and thank you to all of you for your consideration and for supporting the parentless children of this world through your transactions!
Mission
CameroonONE is the first organization in Cameroon placing orphaned children in the household of surviving relatives while ensuring that they receive an education and proper healthcare within a secure family environment in order to bring hope and opportunity to a large population of the country’s orphans.
Vision
To create a culture in which all orphaned children in Cameroon have the opportunity to grow as a member of a family and become productive citizens who will impact and lead their community into a better future.
You can learn more about CameroonONE at:
https://www.cameroonone.org/projectshttps://www.facebook.com/CameroonONE/https://twitter.com/CameroonONE