| What are the costs that are covered by the Adoption Program |
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| WHAT ARE THE COSTS THAT ARE COVERED BY THE ADOPTION PROGRAM? We also know that to offer free food without automatically providing free self-reliance training would ultimately lead to deepening the negative form of dependency. Therefore, we know we are obligated as an organization to do our best to facilitate the means and opportunities to increase the capacity for each person in each family to achieve permanent self-reliance. We offer the parents self-reliance courses that teach work ethics, job retention, and effective single parenting for the working parent. We offer the children a character building program called "Homegrown Heroes” and the teen version which is called "Community Champions.” These programs offer opportunities for the children and teens to learn how to get out of poverty and how to gain immediate food security in their household, such as our very popular community garden program where the children help grow food for their household. Our award winning self-reliance programs have enabled many parents over the years to gain and retain meaningful employment that provides a “living wage” instead of the parents joining the "working poor.” We hope you can see and understand why we do not accept a family onto our roster without accepting that the costs of this training are just as important to meet as are the costs of distributing free food. Like any organization, our success attracts more clients. The word-of-mouth success stories of the parents who have attended our self-reliance programs have had a big impact in the community. The newly enrolled parents hear about these success stories and become excited about taking the courses that enabled the previous parents to get out of poverty. The parents willingly join our pre-training program that is for attaining food security by learning to prepare, preserve and store food in ways that provide the most amount of nutritional value. These parents become focussed on following all of the nutritional guidelines we suggest will help to get their bodies recovered from chronic hunger. The parents quickly learn that good food can improve their capacity to be better parents, their capacity to learn how to retain employment, their capacity to learn what is taught in the self-reliance courses. This is exactly why we have been so successful. We know it takes 6-8 weeks of getting enough nutrition before the newly enrolled parents are capable of sitting through 5-8 weeks of class and learning enough to be able to successfully apply the training. This fact has enabled us to know how to pace ourselves to be able to schedule spaces for the newly enrolled parents. In the past, we have been thrilled each time we see a parent become driven to get into the self-reliance programs. But, this winter we encountered a new problem. The drastic need for food required UsMoms to enrol more families than our scheduling system could absorb. We cannot teach enough classes to cover the number of parents who are ready to begin the self-reliance programs. The increased numbers of families on our roster will require us to hire sub-contractors to facilitate the self-reliance programs. We believe it is urgent that we do this soon, as we are seeing a trend begin that has us concerned. This is the trend. When the parents have begun to feel healthy enough to start asking to attend the self-reliance courses, we have had to tell them it will be months before we can fit them into a class. When the parent hears this, we see many of the parents act out their disappointment in negative ways. Mostly, they seem to take this delay personally. Then their attitude about their own self-worth plummets again. Their trust in UsMoms plummets when we have to explain that we do not have the finances to run more classes to cover the drastic increase in the number of parents who have signed up for the classes. The minute we mention that we do not have enough money, the parents react as if we will never have the money to cover their costs for taking the courses. Ultimately we see the parents become resigned to remaining impoverished and helpless to change their future. We know that this is a habitual state of mind that these parents return to. We are concerned because the delay affects their willingness to trust that they will receive the help they need to get out of poverty permanently. This lack of trust has changed the progress of each family we have had to tell the truth of the situation to. We find that when a space in one of the classes does become available, the parents are not driven to organize their life to be able to attend. This has never been true before. We know it has to do with the delay period between when they get excited enough to commit to building their own self-reliance plan and when we can fit them in. We are missing the opportune moment when the parent is self-motivated. The costs of putting these self-reliance courses on for the parents and then supporting the parents during their practise stage is really low when we get the class space donated. We have managed to get the cost with hiring a facilitator down by getting most of the printed materials donated from local stores such as Staples. We can train a parent for an average cost of $248.04 per year, or about $4.77 per week. So, you can see that we can feed a family and provide the parent with our self-reliance course for $10.00 per week or $520.00 a year. The $10.00 covers the $5.23 for the weekly box of free food and the $4.77 we put into the families’ self-reliance training. We have designed this adoption program to cover these costs for each family. |
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