Getting Ready for the Next Decade

Mentioning the next decade sounds like serious aging has kicked in. Does it suggest that Child’s Dream is getting old and matured now? Most likely, but we feel as energetic and are as motivated as on day one, as we are gearing up and getting ready for the third decade of service to our beneficiaries. We can hardly comprehend it, but it’s reality and next year, Child’s Dream will celebrate its 20th birthday. Not in our wildest dreams would we have guessed in 2003 that we would be standing here like this 20 years later. Sure, we assumed and hoped to still be around, helping kids in need. But never would we have expected to have reached over 1 million children with over 900 projects implemented, having a tremendous impact on our beneficiaries. And exactly this impact makes us proud of our team and motivates us to plan for yet another decade of passionate support. It goes without saying that all this would never have been possible without the great support of all our donors, whether big or small. Many thanks for that!

Tackling yet another decade needs planning. And planning we did in July together with our four man/woman strong Management Team. Finally, after 2.5 years of Zoom meetings, we could meet again face to face to brainstorm and discuss how to seize the issues at hand. During our retreat, we redefined our Vision and Mission as well as our Strategic Goals and we formalised what we mean with Child’s Dream’s Values and Culture. The world around us constantly changes and in order to keep on spending our scarce resources in the most effective and efficient way possible, we need to align our support with today’s needs. One might ask why do we do this, given the success of the past and the answer is very simple: because standing still is never an option for us. On the contrary, we are driven and inspired by achievement, because we care!

As our name suggests, we are dreamers and we dream of a world where educated and empowered people responsibly shape and sustain fair, just and healthy societies for generations to come. This vision has lead us to our new Mission Statement:

The above mission says it all and allows us to regroup our past and future work in eight Strategic Goals. This is a slight change from our previous three focus groups, ‘Health’, ‘Basic Education’ and ‘Higher Education’. The new Strategic Goals are tangible, targeted and allow for an even more efficient allocation of resources going forward. Our December Newsletter will talk in more detail about the expected impact of these changes, so stay tuned.