Hope for Restoration Initiative believes in family as a foundation that binds community formation, development and a natural hub that nurtures societal norms and values.
The family is the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth, well-being and protection of children.
We believe that family is fundamental basis for social protection and therefore all efforts must be geared towards keeping families together through strengthening their pillars of self-reliance so as to thrive.
Our Approach:
The H4RI approach emphasises the ability for families to be independent and therefore their ability to promote and sustain the development of their respective communities.
Our strength is in periodic family and community outreaches where we make rigorous family and community assessments in order to establish the underlying issues that cause family and community challenges/hindrances to stability and development.
Key underlying issues found to be affecting families include but not limited to; Poverty, Chronic illnesses, Gender based Violence, infidelity, unemployment, death of parents, lack of or poor access to education and health care, displacement from land etc.
Our Intervention:
The H4RI family intervention strategy is majorly premised on identified individual family and community needs. Once the problem is identified, our social workers seat with the family/community to draw plans and strategies of working with family/community to find suitable solutions to the identified problem.
Families are among other things supported through;
We strongly believe that creating sustainable opportunities for children to have access to quality education highly reduces the vulnerability levels in different communities. We believe that an educated society is a healthy and wealthy society.
As such our lobby for resources and formation of partnerships on the other hand provides for educational sponsorships for those families/children that cannot afford school fees. We are blessed with individual and group child sponsors from within and outside Uganda who are making it possible for the disadvantaged children to acquire education.
Through our education sponsorship program we have so far managed to sponsor 113 children since 2018 and we have pushed 11 of them through to Universities and vocational skills training going forward. However, we currently have 203 more children who are seeking a similar opportunity of having access to education.
You can also become a sponsor and rebuild the hope of that child who had totally lost the hope of getting education.
Our work with families and communities is aimed at ensuring that they are self-reliant and can sustain general community development. By emphasizing critical and creative thinking we have managed to help families to identify gaps that hinder their development and as such many of them are finding appropriate solutions for their family and community development.
Premised on the family and community assessments got from our field team, some of the families only need guidance on how to suitably utilise the resources they have at hand, however majority of them need a kick start so as to get them running by themselves.
Our approach to livelihoods support emphasizes planning with the family/community on a livelihood/business venture that can appropriately build their respective income levels and therefore help them to become self-reliant. This largely depends and an individual family and community context.
Among other ventures families usually deal in chicken breeding, stall vending, tailoring business, pig farming, crafts making and selling, dealing in confectionary, hair dressing etc. Once a family is family supported, our field team together with the local leadership monitors progress and guides progress for sustainability.
Apart from the resources provided by H4RI and our partners, the livelihoods support activity is also largely supported by the volunteers that we receive from especially USA and Europe.
Thorough our community outreach program, we have over the years further appreciated that a good number of families are struggling to survive on their own and have therefore had poverty, GBV, chronic illnesses, child abuse, neglect and other underlying factors hugely affect the wellbeing of children in such families. In the process of families and communities grappling to stride on with their lives, children have highly become the victims of circumstances and as such many have ended up running away from their families to seek refuge on the streets and others in children’s homes or “orphanages”. Uganda has is an estimated number of over 15,500 children in just the areas of Mbale, Jinja, Kampala and Iganga Districts – Better Care Network – Enumeration of Children on the Streets in Uganda across Four Locations (2018), and on the other hand there is an estimated 50,000 children in children’s homes/” orphanages” in Uganda – Data for Impact Project/Ministry of Gender Labor and Social Development.
Premised on the above background H4RI has sought sustainable avenues of firstly working hard to maintain children within their families and communities and secondly in case of separation efforts are driven towards ensuring that the child returns home or better still is placed into kinship or foster care.
For the last 3 years our intervention approaches towards placing separated children into foster and kinship care have been informal however starting 2024, H4RI shall work with the responsible Government authorities to identify, assess and train suitable foster and kinship parents/families that are suitable to provide a caring and loving family for that child in need.
On top of the many homeless street connected children, we seek to partner with the interested children’s homes (“orphanages”) to have some of the children under their care successfully reintegrated with their families and communities and others to be placed into temporary foster and kinship care.
H4RI has a team of committed counselors who from time to time do their best to help with the rehabilitation of disgruntled families and individuals plus those at risk. Our counselors mainly interface with families struggling with issues around Gender Based Violence, poverty, infidelity, chronic illnesses especially HIV/AIDS, etc.
Premised on the needs assessment, our counseling services are also periodically extended to schools, prisons and around Entebbe and Luwero.