Dear Friends,
We are so thankful for your partnership and support in 2022. Here’s a quick summary of the year. We “launched” five students, and built closer relationships with each of the students that stayed the entire year. We see God moving in these deepening relationships each day. For 2022, we received a total of $126,127 USD in donations from generous individuals, along with our annual grant of 32,447 AUD from our partners, the Ping Pong-A-Thon in Australia. Your donations covered staff salaries, educational opportunities for our students, medical care for our students, visa and legal costs, and outreach costs, as well as much more. We are so thankful for your generosity and wouldn’t be able to do this work without you.
Recovery
In January 2022, we started with 12 students. We had six full-time students who participated in our program Monday through Friday. We also had three part-time students, and three students studying in university. We began the year with nine staff as well.
We had some big life changes to celebrate this year! “View” finished a baking course with flying colors. “Wow” left the foundation and was hired as a translator for a high-end salon that has many foreign clients. “Fin” graduated with his degree and began teaching theater and drama at a school outside of Bangkok. “Pop,” a previous student, was released from jail and has returned to the program and is doing amazingly.
Outreach
This year our outreach efforts focused on conducting a survey of LGBTQI+ sex workers covering topics like education, finances, safety, and questions about how the person conducts sex work. With these results we will be able to better understand and serve these individuals. We have not reached our goal of 100 respondents, but we made great progress in 2022.
In February, one outreach contact, named “Arisa,” reached out to us for help. Arisa was brought into Thailand illegally as a child, but is actually from a neighboring country. Because of the vulnerability of not having legal working documents in Thailand, Arisa was in a dangerously exploitative work situation. We worked together with A21, and Arisa was repatriated in September.
Job Training/Café/Bakery
This year included a slow comeback for the cafe after encountering difficulties the last two years of covid restrictions. We had lost our main source of revenue (the mom groups we’ve hosted for years) in early 2021. It was tough. The restrictions and loss of revenue whittled our team down to only two full time staff, limited orders and training. We had hoped to restart in Jan 2022 (and did pre-orders) but we lost our cafe manager that month unfortunately. Celeste temporarily stepped back into the cafe, and Wic and her worked hard in March and April to prepare for reopening to the public. Our weekly pre-orders helped students learn and practice, but all of them were eager for daily practice.
In May, we opened to the public, starting with just three days per week. Four of our students were trained enough to help our two staff pull it off. The four students honestly did amazing and stepped up to the challenge; becoming more confident in roles of cashier, barista, kitchen staff, etc. A few even helped train our newer students to help part time. Sales were slow, but steady, and our students were so excited to be able to serve customers again. We hosted a few events and thankfully, we were able to hire an additional staff member, named Waew, to begin managing the cafe. Through the end of the year, sales kept steadily increasing. We honed our products too. We even reached an important goal of adding our menu to an online food delivery app.
** We also knew Wic was taking an important step this year; and he left the cafe too in August. We couldn’t have reopened without him and so grateful for his perseverance. He’s taking his next big step and started university full time in the Fall and we are pretty thrilled about that too! Maddy was also invaluable to the cafe crew as she helped with online orders, marketing and social media. She also practiced English daily with the students working in the cafe, helping their communication and understanding of our English speaking customers.
