Charity Spotlight - Cambodian Children's Trust

While we are still wrapping up and evaluating 2020, we are excited to present the first of many articles to share more about the charities that we support around the world. Last week, on February 11th, Free To Run Foundation and Teens Stand Against Trafficking welcomed another guest speaker to our virtual speaker series. Tara Winkler, who is based in Sydney, Australia, co-founded what eventually would become Cambodian Children’s Trust (CCT) in Battambang, Cambodia. CCT was initially a children’s orphanage, set up to provide a safe place for children rescued from a corrupt and abusive orphanage. Eventually, Tara discovered that the kids in her care weren’t orphans after all, but instead were just from poor families who had trusted the corrupt orphanage to provide better care for their children. This realization, along with a report issued by UNICEF about the orphanage industry in Cambodia in CCT’s early years, led to the transformation of CCT into what they call their Village Hive model. This model empowers communities, provides resources to support vulnerable families and keep them together, and ultimately to protect Cambodia’s children.

Tara Winkler, Co-Founder of Cambodian Children’s Trust, and Teens Stand Against Trafficking Virtual Speaker Series guest, Feb. 2021

Of course, like the majority of organizations, the Covid pandemic has impacted CCT. About 90% of Cambodia’s poorest families live in rural areas, and many of the families that CCT works with live in the countryside. The pandemic and the accompanying shutdowns have hit these families particularly hard, since they cannot generate a steady income. One of CCT’s initiatives is to teach families financial literacy to help them generate business ideas and become more self-sustaining.

Free To Run Foundation is a strong supporter of CCT because we want children everywhere to be protected from exploitation, and in Cambodia specifically, to prevent orphanage trafficking. If you are interested in learning more about CCT, check out their website, watch a TED Talk that Tara gave in Sydney a few years ago, and you can also purchase Tara’s book, How (Not) To Start An Orphanage: By a Woman Who Did.