With the objective to increase family engagement and orient the families about their children’s activities and involvement in Amics del Nepal Children Program, family meetings are conducted usually twice or thrice a year. In the meetings, children’s academic progress and growth based on Amics activities & observations, their needs, learnings, their behavioral and social development, and/or other extra family support needs are discussed and later arranged based on urgency and necessity. While the main focus of Amics family meetings are the sharing of children updates & activities, it’s also important to discuss families updates and situations.
Not being able to conduct these meetings for almost a year created a few communication barriers between the families and Amics. Though frequent follow ups and contacts were made in between to get updated with them, difficulties were faced to get detailed updates and responses in a timely manner. Thus, a family meeting was conducted on 27th March, 2021 with the main objective to orient the families about their children’s activities along with the new terms and conditions of the program. A total of 34 attendees participated in the meeting where more than 90% of them consisted of women and children.
In the meeting, a presentation was made about children program activities and beneficiaries involvement where videos and photos were shown. Additional family data were also updated along with signing of yearly sponsorship & project activities agreements with them. Amics Women Literacy Project survey and a focus group discussion was also conducted among the women attendees to see the possibility of conducting literacy classes for them. In-person discussions were also made with some parents to better understand their situation. It was interesting to see families’ positive response and participation in the meeting and their satisfaction towards their children learning.
