Friends-International Blog

Andong community on the outskirts of Phnom Penh is now a hive of  Home Based Production activity,and a great place to illustrate that as well as female caregivers, male caregivers can be actively involved in production activities to support their families through income generation. The community center is home to a screen printing project, creating [...]

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On International Families Day, one Cambodian mother recalls how the Mith Samlanh program supported her to keep her family together… ‘My husband died leaving me with six children, so I moved to Phnom Penh in search of work. It was very difficult and I didn’t have enough money to send my kids to school here [...]

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Last month, the US embassy in Lao PDR approached Peuan Mit to identify youth for an English Access Microscholarship Program as they were striving to find the most disadvantaged students in Vientiane. This highly effective training program is designed to provide a significant English-language learning experience to bright non-elite 14- to 18- year-old students. Funded [...]

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Today a team from Levi Strauss & Co., who are corporate supporters of Friends-International, arrived at our Phnom Penh headquarters on a mission. That mission? To find out more about Friends, the work we do, and in particular how our Home Based Production initiative works to support caregivers to put their children to school. First [...]

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This week has seen Friends Board Members, Program Directors, International Coordinators, managers and staff from across the world gathering together in Phnom Penh at the FI HQ building for our annual sharing meeting. This is a rare opportunity for us all to get together, to share our achievement from the previous year and to look [...]

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We have some truly fabulous supporters at Friends-International, and one of those is 14 year-old Jessica Brandon from Los Angeles, California. Along with her friends Emma Kofman, and Hannah Kelson, Jessica recently organized a neighborhood bake sale to raise funds to support our activities, and raised an amazing $435 on the day (thanks to Jessica’s [...]

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Menghourng Ngo reports on the excitement and achievement of the Mith Samlanh graduation ceremony held last week in Phnom Penh. ‘On Friday last week, Mith Samlanh held a graduation ceremony for its students at Club Friends. The students who successfully graduated came from the many different Mith Samlanh vocational training classes – skills, life skills [...]

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Cambodian Sihanoukville-based NGO M’Lop Tapang is a long standing Friends CYTI Alliance partner.  Within the CYTI Alliance, sharing of best practice is a key outcome for Alliance members. So it was with great excitement that our Friends-International Peuan Peuan (Thailand) program team based in Bangkok said ‘welcome’ this week to a team from M’Lop Tapang [...]

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Our recently appointed US Funding Officer, Iris Sagi, was in attendance to hear the work of Friends-International being praised at a high profile social entrepreneurship event held last Friday in New York City. The event was the premiere of the movie “The Revolutionary Optimist”  and it was followed by a conversation with the host,  Bill [...]

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James Farley, our Social Work Technical Advisor has shared this case study with us about a good outcome for an abandoned baby thanks to our  Kaliyan Mith Short Term Foster Care Project in Siem Reap, Cambodia. ‘In October 2012 Kaliyan Mith Siem Reap were contacted by Angkor Children’s Hospital (AHC)  regarding Baby V*, a 3 [...]

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