Red Thread Charities was founded to improve the lives of children in China’s orphanages, officially called Social Welfare Institutions (“SWIs”). These institutions care for orphans and facilitate both local and international adoption.
Gone are the days when many healthy children lived in Chinese orphanages and were available for international adoption. Adoption is more accepted in China, and many children are now being adopted by Chinese parents. This change means that there are fewer children in SWIs who might be available for adoption. It also means that the children who remain in China’s SWIs are often children who are more difficult to place into adoptive homes because they have a variety of special needs.
Physical, occupational and special education therapies used with great success in Western countries are not available to most people in China. The basic needs of the special needs children in China’s SWIs are met, but there is very limited, if any, training available to the staff for anything more than that. RTC believes that if these children could receive accurate medical assessment and consistent physical, occupational, and educational therapies, many of them would be adoptable. At the very least, the lives of the children would be vastly improved. The immobile muscles of a child with cerebral palsy can be strengthened through physical therapy, and the child can be taught to walk with braces. The babies with cleft palates can be fed as easily as those with normal palates, using special nursing bottles. Children with developmental delays can learn the joy of music and movement while such activity makes new neural connections in their brains. The right therapies can give these children dignity and self-sufficiency, while reducing the demands that taking care of such children places on their caregivers.
Red Thread Charities has a program to provide these under-served children with the physical, occupational and special education care they need. We do this by:
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•getting the children’s physical and mental conditions medically diagnosed;
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•training SWI rehab staff and caregivers in the basic techniques of physical,
occupational and special education therapies; -
•monitoring the delivery and results of these therapies.
We know from experience that SWI rehab staff and caregivers, once given some professional training and oversight, can and will provide regular, routine physical, occupational and special education therapies. We also know that these therapies can and will lead to independence, self-esteem and dignity for the children. They may even lead to eventual adoption, as has occasionally been our past experience.
It is also the hope and goal of RTC to show an SWI enrolled in our program how to deliver out-patient physical therapy, occupational therapy, and special education therapies to the families in its local area who could benefit from them. Social Welfare Institutions depend on local and provincial support, and their resources are usually quite modest. If an SWI can offer out-patient therapy to the children of the community, its role becomes more important, because it is providing something that is not generally available. Most communities in China have significant unmet needs for physical and occupational therapy and special education for children. RTC believes that once the value of the out-patient therapies being provided by an SWI becomes apparent, the role of the SWI will expand, and its services will become financially self sustaining.
Red Thread Charities is based in Minnesota, U.S.A. Each year, we organize a volunteer team of U. S. medical experts to travel to China to assess orphaned children and to train orphanage workers and foster families in basic physical, occupational, and special education therapies and techniques. We hire Chinese experts in these fields, living and working in China, to reinforce our training on a regular basis. We also employ local supervisors in China to ensure that what is taught is carried forward. Our bilingual assessment / treatment forms are completed monthly by orphanage workers to document medical histories for each child in their care. Through this, we are able to ensure continuity of care and accountability.
Our approach is to work intensively with an orphanage. We emphasize hands-on training and we model treatments. We initiate our program with only one SWI each year. Our direct hands-on approach is effective because of the attention we can devote to the SWI and because we control all funds related to our work, thereby ensuring that all funds are used for their intended purpose–to help the children.
