Free To Shine Joins Family Care First Network

Free To Shine is thrilled to announce our new partnership with Family Care First. Family Care First is a network of organisations working together to support children living in safe, nurturing family-based care. The nearly 50 other member organisations within Family Care First include local Non-Government Organisations (NGO’s), international NGOs, UN agencies, donors, academic institutions and government partners.Family Care First has two main areas of focus: ‘Systems and Policies’ and ‘Services and Practices’. Under ‘Systems and Policies’ Family Care First is working with the Cambodian government to support existing systems and develop a national plan to strengthen child protection mechanisms. Family Care First also works at the community level to provide direct support to vulnerable families under ‘Service and Practices’. We are proud to have joined such a robust network that is working hard to improve outcomes for children and families and ensure that children can live in safe, nurturing family-based care.Family Care First has already been instrumental in Free To Shine’s shift to the online case management system, OSCaR, designed by and for social workers in Cambodia. The OSCaR system incorporates the use of the Child Status Index (CSI), a framework for assessing the needs of vulnerable children and creating individualised goal-directed service plans for use in monitoring the well-being of children and households. With access to these new tools, Free To Shine will be able to improve case management and monitoring & evaluation efforts, allowing us to better track and report on the impact of our work.We are extremely excited about this new partnership and cannot wait to get started sharing our knowledge and learning from the other Family Care First members in the network.