Rok Kern is an Invitation
We are pleased to meet you
The Rok Kern team has a wide variety of education, development, volunteer and missions experience and we are keen to share the journey we have been on with you.
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Rok Kern offers education and faith-based organisations the opportunity to bring their students and congregations on a journey of discovering new ways of doing volunteering and mission trips. The Rok Kern Learning Academy grew out of the preparation and debriefing materials that we created for those who attended a Rok Kern exposure trip to Cambodia. Now, we are excited to offer these courses to anyone who wants to dig deeper into understanding your personal response to poverty and justice.
We are keen to invite you to discover new perspectives and changed communities.
We invite you to learn from people you might not normally learn from, to celebrate the transformation that is happening is societies and to advocate for loving families for children.
We invite you into a journey of self-discovery and of discovering what it means to care for those who are marginalized or experiencing poverty.
We invite you to risk questioning things you think you know about development, charity, missions, and yourself to learn how you can support sustainable long-term change and strengthen families to help them grow and thrive.
The courses have been developed by our team and are free for you to use. If you would like to have the sessions facilitated for your group in-person or as a webinar, please email our team at enquiries@rokkernacademy.com who will connect you with one of our trained facilitators.
We are excited to be able to share these resources with you and look forward to your feedback as you access the courses.
WHY ORPHANAGES?
Children belong in families. A child thrives when they experience the love and care of parents and extended family members. The UN has declared that growing up in a family is a human right and every nation in the world has committed to prioritising family-based care for vulnerable children. Since 2016, there has been a growing awareness that many orphanages are using human trafficking in order to attract visitors to sustain their business models.
Rok Kern is a project of Children in Families, one of Cambodia’s first family-based care organisations. We, at Rok Kern, believe that orphanages are an example of when short-term, outside-driven solutions are applied to contexts that people don’t fully understand. Rok Kern is an invitation to try to understand this context more. We invite you to learn about the research surrounding orphanages and to come and meet the staff at CIF and our partner organisations that are at the forefront of family based care and reintegration in Cambodia. For those of you who have relationships with orphanages, we invite you to learn about the global movement away from institutions and then take that knowledge back to the orphanage you work with.
We invite you to risk questioning things you think you know about development, charity, missions and yourself to learn how you can support sustainable long-term change in Cambodia and strengthen families to help them grow and thrive.
Australia and the US transitioned away from orphanage-based care for children when there was an increased awareness of child-protection, a focus on improving social work standards and financial support for families experiencing poverty.
Rok Kern invites you to see how all three of these factors are currently happening in Cambodia and advocate with us, and with over 40 other Cambodian-based organisations, to place children back in families, where they belong.