Helping Children Worldwide

Child Welfare and Child Reintegration Centre - The Organization provides support in Sierra Leone for aid to young women, children and families suffering from extreme poverty and continued to provide primary financial support for the Child Reintegration Center ("CRC") in Sierra Leone. The collaboration between the Organization and CRC offers direct services to children and families in one of the most impoverished regions of the world, and provides training, coaching and mentoring services to child welfare agencies in Sierra Leone and West Africa to change their service model to family support work. In Sierra Leone, illiteracy hovers between 60% and 70%, 60% live below the global poverty line of $1.90 per day and poverty is the number one reason children are living on the street and do not go to school. Because of CRC programs, 1231 children under 18, 1457 young people in school, and 422 families were supported during 2023. CRC programming is family-centered, and community based, with a professional case management staff, and offers clients educational scholarships, access to medical care, and family strengthening services through counseling, parenting education,economic supports, community education and training.During 2023 the CRC hosted multiple educational and training seminars for provider organizations in Africa on how to reintegrate children living without parental care or on the street into families and homes and traveled outside the borders of Sierra Leone in support of collaborations. The Organization's professional staff traveled with CRC professional staff and provided remote support and curriculum for seminars. In addition to direct collaborative efforts in programs, the Organization supports training teams to assist CRC case managers' efforts to provide quality care that meets global standards, despite extreme low resource environments.

Empowerment programs - The Organization's United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM) teams are comprised of individuals who are trained and then travel to Sierra Leone to volunteer at CRC and Mercy Hospital. Over the years, teams have engaged in a wide variety of service projects to support the lives of children and their families, including medical and dental clinics, construction projects, teacher training collaborations, and capacity building work with local leadership. Three Village Partnerships were active during 2023, funding the construction of basic community infrastructure, providing medical and nutrition clinics for children and mothers, and supporting family strengthening services to villages through Mercy Hospital, mission team volunteers overseen by the medical staff and mission partnership liaison at the Missionary Training Centre and by Child Reintegration Centre case managers and social workers, and various contractors in Sierra Leone. The Organization's professional staff provided direct support on the ground and via remote collaborations.The Organization continued to build the capacity of the CRC and Mercy staff in 2023, by bringing in experts from the United States of America and the United Kingdom in medicine, surgery, physical rehabilitation, and nursing care, organizational leadership, case management and social work.

Global Health and Mercy Hospital The shared mission of Mercy UMC Hospital ("Mercy") and HCW is to improve infant and maternal mortality rates in Sierra Leone by providing holistic, community-focused care, regardless of ability to pay. Mercy is a 50-bed facility with a trained and dedicated medical staff including a full-time doctor, a medical laboratory, a research laboratory, a fully stocked pharmacy on-site, an HIV/Aids clinic, and a surgical wing with two operating theatres. In 2023, between malaria clinics (11,580), nutirtion clinics (614), hospital admissions and prenatal clinics (218) Mercy Hospital and Mercy Outreach were able to provide medical and diagnostic services to 16,634 patients in Bo and 45 villages.Mercy's outreach into the surrounding villages includes nutrition clinics and treatment provided for malnourished infants, prenatal care and education, malaria testing and treatment, diarrhetic disease diagnosis and treatment, and HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, as well as support for basic health needs in clean water and sanitation.Together for Global Health, the Organization's network of practitioners across the globe collaborated on the Rising Tides policy conference in Washington, D.C., met monthly to discuss issues in more than 23 countries, and provided informational podcasts regarding global health.