Lily Kanter
Director
Cambodian Children’s Fund
Dear Lily
As a member of the Cambodian Children’s Fund
board, and as a financial contributor to CCF, I wonder if you are aware that the money you
are investing in the future of impoverished Cambodian children is funding the
institutionalization of these children and contributing to the break up of
their families?
How many children are in residential care with
CCF now? Do you know? How well informed are you about CCF’s modus operandi and
the impact it has on families?
700 + was the last figure that was made public by
CCF. Since then a cloud of secrecy has surrounded the number of kids sleeping
in dormitories – often between 2 and 4 to a bed. Indeed, the word that best
describes CCF, when you look beyond the glossy brochures, the glowing
hagiographic media releases (“Scott gave up his $1million Hollywood
career…etc”) and happy snaps posted on Facebook, is ‘secrecy’.
Scott does not believe in transparency and feels
under no obligation to be accountable to anyone – including, perhaps, the CCF
board?
As you may be aware by now, I am an Australian
journalist, blogger and filmmaker who has been travelling to Cambodia for 20
years now. Many of my interests and concerns are the same as yours – for the
poor and the powerless in 3rd world countries. Where we differ is in
what we believe to be the appropriate response to extreme poverty of the kind
found in many Cambodian families. In the case of the Cambodian Children’s Fund I
believe, with few exceptions, that impoverished and severely disadvantaged
children should be helped within a family and community context. You, on the
other hand (along with Scott and the CCF Board) believe that removing children
from their families and raising them in orphanages is an appropriate way of
dealing with endemic poverty.
That you should describe CCF as an ‘orphanage’
goes to the heart of the problem as I see it.
Your description of the Cambodian Children’s Fund
online reads as follows:
"It's an
orphanage that took the poorest of the poor off this rancid dump site. I'm
investing in the person running the operation," she (you, Lily Kanter) said. "There are 515
kids there, and he (Scott Neeson) is absolutely going to transform the lives of
these human beings. They were trash pickers - you've never seen anything like
it."
Your reference to CCF as an ‘orphanage’ is 5
years old now but even back in 2010, very few of the children in institutional
care at CCF were actually orphans. That they were orphans was the impression
that Scott wished to create. It was a great marketing ploy: “These poor kids
with no parents to take care of them! Scott Neeson steps up to the plate, gives
up his million Hollywood career, and
becomes a dad to the lot of them. What a wonderful man.”
Your description of CCF as an ‘orphanage’ also
dates back to a time when ‘orphanage’ was not a dirty word; when people who ran
‘orphanages’ were, by definition, in the public imagination at least, ‘good
people’. Then, as it became widely known and disseminated this past few years
how damaging orphanages are to the children institutionalized in them, CCF
began to counter any perception of it being an ‘orphanage’. Just because the
word does not appear in any CCF public relations material does not mean that
CCF is not, for the 700 + kids in residential care, for all intents and
purposes, an orphanage.
(This 700+ figure will, no doubt, lead one of
Alan Lemon’s online personas to write, “What evidence do you have to support
this 700+ figure, or is it just a figure plucked out of your…” To which I will
reply, “Why not simply tell us, Alan, how many children CCF has in residential
care?” And Alan will respond with words to the effect of, “I am not Alan Lemon.
You need psychiatric help, James.”)
As you will be aware, it is universally accepted
(even by the Cambodian government) that 75% of children in Cambodian
‘orphanages’ have at least one living parent; that close to 100% of ‘orphans’ have members
of their extended family who could care for them, within the community, if they
were provided with assistance. Extensive research also tells us that it costs
between 5 and 9 times as much money to support a child in an orphanage as it
does to support the same child within his or her family. So, quite apart from
the psychological and emotional damage done to institutionalized kids,
‘orphanages’ make no sense from an economic point of view.
Rather than help children within a family and
community context hundreds of fake orphanages have sprung up in Cambodia this
past decade. It is unsurprising that materially poor parents, unable to
adequately feed, clothe and educate their children, should welcome with open
arms NGOs like CCF that say to them, essentially.
“We
will take care of your kids. We will
feed them well, clothe them, see to it that get medical and dental attention
and proper schooling.”
What impoverished mum and dad, loving their
children and wishing the best for them, is going to knock back such as offer?
And when the NGO representative (in this case CCF) presents them with a
document to place their thumb print on, which mum and dad (most of whom can
neither read nor write) is going to ask precisely what it is they are signing?
And which mum and dad, having placed their thumb print on the ‘contract’ they
have entered into with the NGO (in this case CCF) is going to feel that they
can say, “Can I please have a copy of the contract?” And what happens when mums
and dads ask CCF (in this instance) for their children to be returned to their
family and are told:
“Sorry,
but you signed a contract with us and we re going to keep your kids until they
are 18.”
What do these poor illiterate mums and dads do
then? Engage the services of a lawyer and take CCF to court?
The reality, in Cambodia, is that once an
‘orphanage’ obtains custody of children, those who run the orphanage, (in this
case(CCF) acquire pretty much unlimited power and control over the lives of
those children and can use them as bargaining chips to exert control over the
parents also. Read:
http://cambodianchildrensfund.blogspot.com/2014/11/25-scott-nesson-locks-poor-family-out.html
And view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve280RWEV5w
Every now and then there is an orphanage scandal
here in Cambodia, of course, and much talk at a government, NGO and media level
about the need for reform, the need to close fake orphanages etc. This has been
going on for years now. Before long, however, the news cycle moves on and it is
back to business as usual – any and every foreigner who wishes to do so taking
advantage of the poverty of Cambodians and the lack of a rule of law to
essentially steal children and use them to either raise money or, in the case
of evangelical Christians, save souls.
CCF is not in the business of saving souls but it
is certainly in the business or making money. A lot of money. By its own
admission CCF was, in 2013, generating $4,000 per child per annum in
sponsorships and donations – at least according to CCF’s Tax Return, (“Organization Exempt from Income Tax”) to
be found at:
In Line 4a the figure of $1,603,309 appears
alongside a list of educational programs servicing 760 kids.
Simple mathematics reveals that CCF claimed, in
2013, to be spending roughly $2,000 per child per annum for education.
The following financial year, 2014, the
sum spent by CCF on education was $2.47 million to
educate 2,295 Cambodian children. So, the number of kids being educated by CCF
tripled in 12 months. This may well be a very good thing but we cannot know
whether it is or not without knowing how many of these 2,295 CCF children are,
in fact, receiving free education in a Cambodian public school. I have asked
this question of Alan Lemon but he, as with Scott Neeson, refuses to answer any
such questions.
Is this refusal to answer questions an official policy
sanctioned by the CCF board? Would you and your fellow board members be prepared
to answer the questions regarding CCF’s education programs I have put to Alan
Lemon in my most recent blog entry, #128? (Perhaps Alan Lemon will answer the questions Scott Neeson
refuses to answer?)
In the event that you are not familiar with the
many questions I have asked of CCF this past six or so month, the following
blog entries are a good place to start:
Lily, I have no reason to believe that you are
anything other than a generous and kind-hearted woman wishing to help
impoverished Cambodian children and their families. However, it does seem to me
that perhaps you (and other board members) are not being kept well-informed by
CCF management about what is actually going on behind closed doors at CCF.
As board members you have a duty to keep
well-informed.
Today my blog received it’s 40,000th
page view. The number of people taking an interest in what is written here, and
the comments that follow, rises by the day. It is only a matter of time, I
believe, before CCF’s major sponsors begin to ask of the board why none of the
questions being asked here are ever addressed.
best wishes
James Ricketson
