Warm Heart

Warm Heart offers a three-part solution to the grinding poverty of Phrao District, Chiang Mai Province in Thailand, and to its most terrible consequence, the trafficking of many of its young children into the commercial sex industry. Warm Heart provides homes for the most vulnerable children, a school like no other in the district, and a small business incubator.

Warm Heart provides a community of family-style homes for ten children and three adults each. The Children’s Homes provide families for fifty children and five women, as well as training for ten young adults. Together Children’s Homes form an environmentally self-sustaining com munity that employs integrated pig farming and bio-gas production, fish farming, and organic gardens. The community minimizes operating costs by feeding itself and serves as a demonstration site for the Warm Heart business incubator.

The Children’s Homes will target Phrao District’s most vulnerable children. These are 11 to 17-year-olds from the poorest, most dysfunctional families who are most likely to be forced to work. Children are selected in consultation with headmen, public health and local government officials, according to a procedure developed by the Thai government and international agencies. With time, family care and an education, these children can become anything they dream of; without Warm Heart interven tion, their lives effectively end when they leave for the cities.

Warm Heart operates a private, but government-licensed middle school and after-school program for 120-140 children from marginal families and communities. The school is distin guished by intensive programs in computer science, Chinese, English (taught by ESL certified, native language speakers), and science. Students are also required to participate in a daily after-school program that focuses on traditional arts, dance, music and story telling, and indigenous languages (Akha, Lisau, Lisu). On Saturdays, students work on community development projects and on one Sunday per month engage in volunteer activities.

The Warm Heart school and after-school program have three goals. First, they teach young people the knowledge and skills to make great lives. Second, they provide students the knowledge and skills required to launch the renaissance of local cultures and the many small businesses that might draw on reinvigorated cultural assets. Finally, Warm Heart intends its graduates to be examples for the commu nity as a whole, to show district residents what could be accomplished if everyone lent a hand.

Saving and educating children are investments in the future; without immediate improvements in the local economy, they will never pay off. Phrao residents must have jobs that earn a living wage, because, if not, people will continue to leave for the cities where even prostitution is better than nothing at all. Warm Heart therefore offers a business incubator to help people help themselves. The in cubator provides basic business education from personal finance to micro-enterprise training (in cluding opportunities to work at Warm Heart businesses), product development, manufacturing, pack aging, quality control and marketing consulting, and micro finance. Warm Heart staff are always available and follow up constantly. Most importantly, Warm Heart is there – the only micro-enter­prise/micro-finance/economic development operation in the entire district.