SPECIAL HOPE NETWORK

Our goals are to increase services, including education regarding causes and treatments for disabilities, parent training, navigating access to good medical care, and a community for families who have a child with an intellectual disability. We track children's weights based on the World Health Organization's charts, and work to increase nutrition and health of each of the children we serve. We want Zambian society to develop from one that has few services that are difficult to find, and isolates families who have a child with special needs to one that is inclusive, welcoming, and even, dare we hope, loving toward people who have an intellectual disability. Our Community Outreach trainings are teaching school staff, clinic health staff, and church members and staff all about disabilities. What causes and doesn't cause them, what we can and cannot do about each child's disability, and what methods we can use to include children into each type of community site. We would love to see all churches welcome children who have intellectual disabilities and their families. We would love to have clinics be a safe place for children who have disabilities and their families who have questions. We have a big goal, and are working toward that diligently every day.

Our Community Care Centers are safe places for mothers and caregivers to come with their child to learn academic, communication, motor and adaptive skills alongside other moms. Each caregiver learns good nutrition, how and why to give safe water, positions for feeding, textures of food, and other lifelong knowledge specific to their child's disability. They learn all they need to advocate for their child for life in society, for medical care, and for inclusion. Each Community Care Center has 65 mom/child teams at a time, in a course that takes two years to learn these skills. As one mom finishes her two year program another new mom is added to the program. These CCCs are close to where the families live, and the friends they make during their tenure at our Centers create more stable homes for each mom as they learn together. They now have others in similar situations to themselves, and can be a support to another.

Our Community Outreach Program extends the safe place for our caregivers and their children with intellectual disabilities into the community organizations they'd use most often. Churches, schools and health clinics are the most often visited community sites by our families. We aim to train as many as possible in each of the compounds where our CCCs are located. When a site has more than half its staff trained by our CO team, they are given a poster to place outside their site that says "Disability Friendly Site", welcoming people and especially children with intellectual disabilities right from the front door.

We provide parent training at our Community Care Centers in very poor compounds, where we teach parents in a setting where they are the norm, instead of someone to be stared at, and the odd one who doesn't fit. Each parent has a child with an intellectual disability, and lives in the same compound. We teach parents by modeling everything we do, so that no matter which of the local languages the parent-child team speak, they are able to understand exactly what skills we are teaching them. Parents then teach and model activities to other parents, so there is a groundswell of acceptance and community sharing amongst the moms and caregivers.

Parents who attend and actively participate at our CCCs receive an incentive pack monthly, which increases the financial stability of their family. In the past, our incentive for parents was a pack of a variety of necessary foods, but now the 'incentive pack' is money that can be used for rent or food or medicines. If families opt to get it every six months they get a bit more than the monthly amount, and learn not to depend on our incentive for daily needs. If families opt to get it once a year, the amount is a bit more than the 6 month amount. We are hoping to encourage parents to save to start a small business to be able to support themselves. 390 parent/child teams are currently attending and actively participating in one of 6 Community Care Centers.

We are working to have donors all around the world supporting this endeavor, since we have no support from the government here in the form of money. We have Zambian business and individual donors, and many churches and individuals in the USA.

Our Community Care Centers and Community Outreach are very scalable and replicable. We have refined them over the past 12 years so that as sustainable funding comes in, we can start a new CCC in a new, untrained area, and then begin a Community Outreach Team in that area as well. We can serve 65 more families in each new area.

We have been in Zambia since May of 2010, working on the ground, learning the culture and norms, and learning how to best serve families who have a child with special needs. When Special Hope Network began we had one Pastor and one Special Education Teacher. Almost 12 years later, we now have proven methods that are working well: parents are growing, kids are learning, and we are well-connected with medical service options, and doctors and pharmacists who know the unique medical needs of children with special needs. We have 48 staff who are learning and growing and are rising to new levels of challenge as we add one-two Community Care Centers per year (our lofty goal!). Our support staff (cleaners, driver, gardener) is well-practiced at supporting all our educational programming. We are all committed to one vision- serving children with intellectual disabilities the best we can.

Since 2010, we have had steady and slow progress. We founded 6 Community Care Centers, serving 390 children and their primary caregiver weekly. We have trained hundreds of others who work at other local NGOs, ministries, and government offices regarding special needs and what can and cannot be done to improve their situation (educationally, medically, nutritionally, and even the positions they sit/stand in, and textures of food they eat). Two CCCs began in 2012, two began in 2018, and another 2019. We started our sixth CCC in July of 2022. Our next CCC is targeted to begin in December 2022. Slow and steady progress has meant we have been able to tweak and change our model to make it simple to run by our Zambian staff, and easily scalable for adding more Centers, extending our reach into untrained communities.

Our Community Outreach began in January of 2021, and has trained at 13 churches and 8 schools, as well as 3 health clinics. Each school trained for three weeks in a row to learn our Disability Advocacy Training. The church groups are learning for 8-week training sessions. Health clinics are also learning in 8 week trainings. Two of the schools we trained fully are now enrolling learners who have intellectual disabilities. Our church advocates have been training their Sunday school teachers the methods they learned about how to add children with disabilities into their classes. People from the clinics are encouraging parents to visit our Community Care Centers, after identifying the child with a disability and encouraging them to attend our CCC. Our disability advocates are graduates of our Disability Advocacy Training program. They are now identifying children who have intellectual disabilities in their compound, and asking us to begin a new CCC near those children. Advocacy has really been on an upward swing this year.