Jchoice.Org

Organization Focus: The Foundation is dedicated to protecting and improving the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable children living in Institutions outside the United States around the world who have been abandoned by their family or who have been removed from their family for their protection. The Foundation was established in 2000 to implement humanitarian aid programs to help children without families to be safe and to thrive, to realize their potential, and to build successful lives as adults.

1. Basic Care- providing food, shelter and clothing to children enduring desperate living conditions. These projects include access to clean water, basic nutrition, clothing, sanitation, air conditioning and heat, beds and bedding.

2. Medical, Rehabilitative, and Wellness Care - facilitating surgical interventions and medical care for children living with Illness, deformity, or mental impairment while also seeking to increase preventive care. Projects Include surgeries for children with facial deformities or physical defects as well as providing other medical/surgical procedures, medicines, vaccines, rehabilitative equipment, therapy, and routine medical and dental care. Over the last seven years, sixteen children have received essential surgeries including open-heart surgery, cleft palate repair, hernia repair, and prosthetic limbs.

3. Quallty of Life Care- improving the quality of life for children who are unlikely to find families because of age or special medical issues. Projects include providing a safe loving environment, teaching basic life skills, social integration, basic educational skills, vocational programs, recreational facilities and programs, establishing computer labs, and duplicating family-style living for homeless or institutionalized children.

Program Objectives: The original Sunbeam Village began by placing 60 children In China in a family style setting in the city of Hefei. The second Sunbeam Village was dedicated In August of 2006 in Ma'nshaan. The third village in Wuzhou (Procter & Gamble Village) was dedicated on December 1, 2007, sponsored by Procter & Gamble. The Fourth village opened In Yulin China In April 2008. It Is the goal of the Foundation to continue to support the current villages, continue to increase the number of children living in each new village every year and also open new villages throughout China.

2008

As a thirteen-year-old in 2002, living a rather comfortable and insular life, I did not know how I would react to the presence of a randomly chosen little girl from the other side of the world in my life. But my profound love for my sister, now eight-years-old, has sparked in me a desire to fight for the lives of the hundreds of thousands of abandoned children in China just like her – and to provide them with the same opportunity she was given six years ago: a shot at life.

This past summer, I traveled through China with a friend to work in orphanages and to make a documentary about Chinese orphans and the efforts being made to help them. As part of my trip, I saw the amazing work that the Alliance for Children Foundation is doing to better the lives of abandoned children, including their latest and most revolutionary effort yet, the Sunbeam Villages.

A Sunbeam Village is a building provided by the Chinese government that becomes an apartment complex for sponsored families to become the central element in a new care system for abandoned children. Married couples in the city apply for the position as “parents”, and if approved, move into the building and take care of five or six children, with all basic needs covered by the Alliance for Children Foundation.

After living for only two months in the Sunbeam Village of Yulin, a developing city in southern China, the children have come out of their shells, and their sponsored family has become their real family in every sense of the word. One mother in the village, eyes welling up with tears, explained to me how she loves her new children as much as her own, and how important it is for them to wake up and hug “Mama” every morning.

Because there is not enough room in the Sunbeam Village for all the children in the orphanage, I was able to see firsthand the real and heartbreaking differences between the children receiving constant love and care in the Sunbeam Villages, and those left in institutional orphanages. Infants in the Village, for example, receive round-the-clock attention from their “parents,” while, just next door in the orphanage, I witnessed a small room with thirty cribs lined up one against one another, two babies to each crib. Caregivers rarely coddled these babies, leaving them crying helplessly in their cribs for hours each day. When my sister first came to our home, her voice was hoarse from crying for so long without attention.

When people ask me what I gathered from my trip in China, I tell them one thing: the Alliance for Children Foundation is making an immense difference in children’s lives, one life at a time. One life is your daughter. Your son.  My sister. Please consider a gift to the Alliance for Children Foundation. Be as generous as you can, because the more you give, the more you help.

Thank you on behalf of all the children who need you….