ICT PARTNERSHIP | Partnership In Action

Shilpa Children’s Trust

ICT began working with Shilpa Children’s Trust or ‘Shilpa’ in 1998. Back then, Shilpa, a local NGO in Sri Lanka, was run modestly, by a group of former head-mistresses, school teachers and judge’s wives. Local volunteers were involved and they had survived, raising funds from events and sale of goods made by the children. ICT identified Shilpa as a potential partner because of its: strong community participation, commitment common values; and sound leadership. Initially, we spent a lot of time learning from one another and Shilpa spent a lot of time with the local community, asking about how Shilpa could improve its work and make a ‘step-change,’ as an organisation, so it could make more of an impact on the lives of displaced girls in Sri Lanka.

It was clear that Shilpa was not able to meet the demand for child care and protection during the civil war and that many more orphaned and abandoned children were in need of Shilpa’s support. Shilpa could not, at that stage of its organisational development, meet the ever-increasing demand for care. Furthermore, Shilpa was (is still) located in a poor slum and members of that local community were also in need of support; a need that was not being met at that time. Therefore, together, ICT and Shilpa partnered to make an application to the European Commission (EC) to: expand the Shilpa child protection centre; hire more staff capable of managing the centre and providing the children with the care and protection that they needed; and build and supply a vocational training centre, so that Shilpa was able to engage with and offer practical skills training to the poor young women in the local community.

As Shilpa began to benefit from much needed investment from the EC, via ICT, ICT applied to the Commonwealth Foundation to request funding to send Shilpa’s then Secretary of the Board of Trustees to India to learn about local resource mobilisation and sustainability. The grant was made and the Shilpa Board member came back to Sri Lanka extremely energised and initiated a child sponsorship programme, targeting Sri Lankan expat communities in the UK, Canada and Australia. The Child Sponsorship programme, ultimately, raised enough to cover Shilpa’s main running costs, so that by the time the EC grant was winding down, Shilpa had made its recent expansion sustainable.

ICT also introduced Shilpa to many organisations that became direct donors of Shilpa, for example, Global Fund for Children, a US-based organisation, ended up funding Shilpa directly for some of its project initiatives. ICT continues to support Shilpa, although nowhere near the levels it funded during the EC investment and expansion phases. In 2007, ICT was able to set up an Endowment Fund for Shilpa, thanks to a generous donor whose daughter volunteered at Shilpa. The interest from the endowment will, for many years to come, fund a programme to help the girls who are leaving Shilpa at age 18 to transition to independent living. As ICT is regularly assessing organisations that need ICT’s help, in a way that Shilpa once did, ICT has had to be willing to begin to ‘let go,’ so we have given Shilpa a lot of warning that we will be withdrawing our ongoing fundraising, monitoring evaluation and reporting efforts in Sri Lanka by 31 March, 2010.

Not all programme partnerships are as ideal as the partnership that ICT had with Shilpa, but we see our experience as a good example of a long-term commitment that truly made an impact without creating huge dependency. Both ICT and Shilpa are stronger for having been engaged in the partnership.