Hey Ann,
Good to hear from you. Yes, Room to Grow is still focusing on children without parents. We don't need a formal proposal from anyone but we do need some info, especially if we haven't visited the project ourselves and haven't worked with them before.
Our biggest concern is where the children come from and can they be reunited with family? Our ideal situation is to help children stay with family and extended family, so we would need to understand the situation of these kids. Our goal is to support kids with no other options.
The other issue is around safety and protection for children, so that's about your friend and her ability to provide care. I think lately we've come across an issue with religious boarding houses. Its ok to be religious, but in order to support an orphanage, all children need ot be able to freely access their religion of choice. They are children, so usually they are happy to participate in Christian praying, for example. But if they come from a Muslim family, its important that they don't lose their connection to their culture either. So if your friend is religiously oriented, we need to see a plan for ensuring that children are helped to practice religious freedom (because they are children they need active measures from the orphanage to do that).
Those are the two big issues.
Otherwise, R2G isn't really doing much ongoing food support these days - very difficult for us to implement and monitor. So we do some emergency food, and we've done a bit of baby food with well established partners, but we probably can't provide ongoing support for milk to a new partner.
We would also need to know how to transfer money if the proposal is successful as we don't have anyone up in Chiang Rai.
Hope that helps. If you do get something together in the next month, the timing will be very good as the Board of Directors will meet in early/mid March to consider and vote on new proposals. Tell your friend that pictures always help! อีโมติคอน smile
All the best
Jen