Cambodian Children’s Fund (CCF)

CCF Founder, Scott Neeson, spent 26 years in the film industry, where he eventually served as president of 20th Century Fox International. He managed revenues in excess of $1.5 billion and oversaw the release and marketing of several blockbuster films including Braveheart, Titanic, Star Wars, and X-Men.

In 2004, Scott left the film industry and set up Cambodian Children’s Fund. Paying for all of the start-up costs out of his own pocket, Scott now spends his time administering CCF in Phnom Penh as Executive Director while also fundraising abroad.

As the one-time disposal site for chemical companies, hospitals and heavy industry, the Steung Meanchey district of Phnom Penh was one of the largest garbage dumps in Southeast Asia, and one of the most environmentally toxic and dangerous environments in the world. While they scavenged, children and their families were under constant threat of violence, sexual abuse, trafficking, and disease.

Our approach is based on a fundamental belief that education will provide children pathways out of poverty. By developing the leadership potential of our students, leaders will emerge that will create generational change and a better future for Cambodia.

Now with 16 years experience operating in the community we have a program model that has proven effectiveness and are keen for others to be able to apply our model to their community.

Although poverty continues to fall, the vast majority of families remain near-poor, vulnerable to falling back into poverty. World Bank, May 2019.

As an entry point to the city, Steung Meanchey is the place of last resort, the destination for families who have fallen off the social and economic ladder. Many families CCF serves suffer the effects of malnutrition and disease brought on by living in such squalor, without access to basic hygiene, potable water and proper housing.

With little hope of escaping the ingrained poverty, fathers abandon families, communities fragment, alcoholism sets-in and domestic abuse ensues. In Steung Meanchey the occurrences of alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic abuse, both physical and sexual, is exceptionally high.

CCF is working in a dislocated community which is predominately uneducated, without the knowledge and skills to progress from their day-to-day subsistence; who are suffering from malnutrition, and disease, as well as post-conflict PTSD; living in extreme poverty with no food or housing security, without access to clean water, sanitation or healthcare; who are in high risk of physical and sexual abuse; in a country that does not have the infrastructure or capacity to provide the services needed to address all these issues.

We believe that with the right education, one child has the potential to lift an entire family out of poverty and that a generation of educated children has the power to change a whole society. Through intensive, long-term investments in children, CCF is helping students build the skills, confidence and integrity they need to become progressive spokespeople and leaders of change in their communities.

Since 2004, we’ve been working with some of the most impoverished communities in Cambodia. Back then, our world revolved around the health and wellbeing of 45 children from the garbage dump. Today, there are around 2,000 students working towards a better future for themselves and their families through CCF’s award winning education program.

The garbage dump was closed in 2009. However the need for CCF’s services continues as Steung Meanchey remains an entry-point into Phnom Penh for destitute families with no option but to try and make a living through scavenging or begging on the city streets.

Through a range of programs that focus on 6 core areas – Education, Leadership, Careers & Life Skills, Childcare, Community Outreach, and Healthcare – we take a holistic approach to developing integrated solutions to the complex issues of poverty.

Most families living on the fringes of the former Steung Meanchey dumpsite are migrants from the countryside with no employable skills. They depend predominantly on scavenging for their livelihood and remain in the slums where alcoholism, drug abuse and violence is endemic. 

When families are living on day-to-day subsistence, educating a child to adulthood for 12 years is a luxury most of them cannot comprehend. Parents cannot afford to send their children to school, and more importantly, they cannot afford to lose the income their child would earn which results in their children dropping out of schools. 

CCF’s low cost, high impact approach places culturally appropriate and locally driven development at the heart of its program design. Employing and training local mothers as childcare staff for example forms the cornerstone of this ethos, which allows families in this transient community to build ties with one another and begin to value communal security in a place where mutual responsibility was once non-existent.

The community support services such as free medical care, food assistance, financial support and community housing, for example, have directly increased student enrollment rates, improved academic performance and reduced absenteeism.

CCF strives to break cycles of poverty and abuse and create positive change in Cambodia through intervention and education for the most impoverished and under-served children and their families.

We are committed to building the capacity of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable communities: those with the most poverty, the greatest health and social problems and the least access to basic resources.

By providing essential community services, CCF ensures that all children — even those once deemed ‘unreachable’ — have access to education. CCF’s approach creates generational change by lifting families from poverty and setting them on a path to independence.

It happened very quickly. Within the first twenty minutes of being on the garbage dump that very first day Scott met a child. He couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy because they were completely covered up, partly to hide from the heat and partly because there was nowhere to leave their belongings.

It turned out that this girl was working on the dump with her mother and younger sister, who we subsequently found out was seriously ill. As they were living in poverty it was relatively inexpensive to sort out their problems right there and then. With the translator Scott had arranged a place for them to live, got the girls into school, the sister into hospital and when back in LA planned sending money each month to keep the family sustained.

It took little less than an hour and it struck him, with the backdrop of horror of the garbage dump, how simple it was to help. That was the start of CCF.

And last year, that girl Scott met, she graduated from university with a degree in finance and economics.

The passion initially was the impact he had as an individual to help. Coming from a privileged lifestyle in LA he says, “I wasn’t big on charity. I was in the mindset of a) not knowing and not trusting where the money would go; and b) it’s the other side of the world and so not my problem.”

He continues, “however, when you are standing on the garbage dump, and the kids are in front of you, all those prejudices become null and void because it is your problem. There is no plan B for this child. You sort of come face to face with your own values, where you can walk away or do something about it.”

“So the passion was actually understanding that as an individual I can help. I have the ability to completely transform a child’s life.”

In recent years, Scott has become passionate about the fact that the benefit will outlast his lifetime and the lifetime of the charity. “That the generational cycle of poverty of 3,000 - 4,000 kids will be gone. There is no reason to expect that it will return and that’s an amazing feeling to know we have done that.”

“In truth, it was an organic process, not a grand vision in the beginning, but being on the ground, visiting the landfill everyday put me in the best position to solve the problems as I found them. It took the first five years to fully realise the complexity of dealing with children in poverty,” says Scott.

Just getting a child into school was a seemingly simple idea but there were dozens of obstacles that were holding the children back. Starting with the loss of income across the families, or the need to look after sick grandparents or younger siblings. “It took a good four-to-five years to really understand how much I didn’t know and to start putting in place all these interdependent programs that primarily ensure the child would get in school and stay in school,” he says.

It then took about another seven-to-eight years to build up the families and community, to have a model that had matured. “That is what makes us unique. We are now the knowledge leader with 10-12 years of hands-on experience building the model from the ground up.” The last four years have been about improving the quality of the programs and strengthening the framework of the model.

“I came from a business background. Senior Management in the corporate world was continuously finding ways to solve problems, big and small. The corporate background helped streamline processes and avoid the usual pitfalls of charity and bureaucracy, and work fast and effectively,” explains Scott.

The 2009 closure of the garbage dump was on the surface a good thing. However, it meant that a large number of families, predominantly single mothers, would not be able to earn an income. That would impact the students in school and in particular the young children in daycare. These children were staying with us while their mothers worked on the garbage dump. 

With the closure of the dump the mother had two options. One was to move to the inner-city slums, living in stairways or on the streets where the children were at very high risk.  Or go back to the rural areas where they had no land, no money and no work. It was a very dark choice. 

So we created a garment training center where we trained these mothers to make bags. They were also trained in finances. We had a lot of guest speakers join. The mothers were making a decent wage while their children stayed in our daycare. 

“In total we trained 72 women and more importantly we didn’t lose any children. There were at least 38 children that would have been lost to the streets once the garbage dump closed,” says Scott.

For some years we had seen the increasingly pressing need to conduct or monitor investigations into the exploitation and abuse of children and to assist in the capacity building of those tasked with the investigation of such offences.

Scott had witnessed with regularity the collapse of criminal proceedings against suspected child rapists, paedophiles and those that injure children due to poor investigations, inappropriate or unenforced laws, lack of education and corruption within the criminal and judicial systems.

While outside CCF’s general poverty reduction model, Scott felt responsibility to help and so for the purposes of this objective, CCF diversified its operational components to establish a Child Protection Unit (CPU) in 2013 under the authority of the Cambodian Ministry of Interior, and in partnership with the Cambodian National Police and other supporting organizations.

The CPU is a CCF affiliated program committed to providing the highest level of service to child victims of abuse or assault across Cambodia. The CPU has conducted in excess of 1,350 investigations, leading to 1,140 arrests (84% of cases). This has increased conviction rates from below 14% in 2011 to consistently above 80% since inception.

CCF’s model consists of standard approaches to poverty reduction such as providing access to education, nutrition, clean water and safe accommodation. The innovation is in how the six program areas are tied together. The outputs and indirect outcomes of one of the 60+ projects in many cases provides the resources and inputs of another project; a child needs to be healthy to be able to do well in school, they need a safe roof over their head at night to be able to successfully go to school in the morning.

The interaction and complex relationships between projects and programs create a ‘value chain’ where the community members are engaged in and then supported to work themselves out of poverty. Additional services and assistance are provided for ever greater involvement in the process of poverty reduction, gender equality, and social change. 

Our position inside the community, our facilities and services offered where the individuals live gives us great insight and levels of collaboration. We can target solutions directly at the heart of the problem and respond quickly to ongoing changes in the community. Our head office with all executive decision making and senior management team is just five minutes from the garbage dump within easy reach of the community members.

The ultimate outcome of CCF’s model is having young adults, who as children were born into extreme poverty, many abandoned on the Steung Meanchey Garbage Dump, transition from higher education with the skills, knowledge and awareness to obtain long-term employment and become financially stable and independent.

In the short term, our objective is to have the most at risk and forgotten children access education and we aim to remove the barriers that would stop them progressing once enrolled. We want our students to stay in school until they can graduate highschool and move onto tertiary education.

Reducing malnutrition in young children while simultaneously ensuring pregnant women and senior citizens have unfettered access to medical and healthcare services, creates an environment that positively supports a student’s attendance at school. Fighting drug abuse on the streets and physical and sexual abuse in the household generates a saftey net for the most negelected children to focus on their studies. Ensuring families have access to food, water and safe accommodation while at the same time helping them to get out of debt or address health issues means parents are not having to rely on children as wage earners and so they can study for academic tests.

In 2019 our Grade 12 pass rate was 84% compared to the national average of 69%. This generated another wave of impoverished students enrolling in university.

Of the first 200 children to enter CCF, 70% have completed highschool and enrolled in university. Plus, with currently 206 students at university and close to 1,500 children in nursery, kindergarten, primary school and secondary school on their pathway to independence, the potential for positive change in the community is far reaching. In 2019, 77% of our university students were female compared to a 2016 national average of 32%.

These older students and graduates are in the community as leaders, taking responsibility to inspire and motivate their peers and younger students and to influence their parents for ever greater commitment to education and poverty reduction.

A short animation describing this can be found here.

CCF’s beneficiary count has stabilised at around 2,000 children, 2,500 families and upto 12,000 individuals a year accessing the services. The model is at its most optimum and we aim not to increase in size of geographical reach or beneficiaries. In 2015 we reached close to 2,500 students, over 3,000 families and served over 15,000 individuals at which point we hit critical mass and programmatic effectiveness was negatively impacted. Since then we have been looking towards model replication over centralised scale-up.

In five years we would hope to have at least one or two franchise partners under way. Given that we would expect a phased approach of development and partners would not implement the full model at the outset, we could expect to have doubled our current number of people being positively impacted by CCF’s model. This number would increase over the years and with only two franchise partners the potential is there to reach 6,000 children and upto 36,000 individuals.

With the model matured, the goal for the next year is to reach the point of financial sustainability, which we are getting close to. With the introduction of regular giving alongside a strong child sponsorship program and wide scope of partnership agreements, ongoing fundraising at a sustained level is achievable. Further reduction of residential childcare costs for that of foster care with the construction of an all female girls-to-grannies village for 200 of our most at risk girls, single mothers and grannies.

The goal within the next five years is to be able to create a social franchise of the CCF model. We do not wish to expand beyond the current geographical boundaries as we have the model operating at programmatic optimum while also being at the most financially effective. However, we do wish for our set of programs and practices to be open for others to use and learn from. Our plan is to have a franchising system in place so that other organisations wishing to enhance their current projects or those starting from the ground up can adopt and adapt their own site-specific version of the CCF way of addressing childhood poverty.

The one year plan does not have much of a barrier beyond current COVID-19 impact on international fundraising. We do need good support in terms of regular giving expertise, someone that has the understanding of the worldwide marketing and branding. As this builds towards the five year goal we do need help in repositioning us in terms of being a single area, single country charity to potentially a capacity building organisation with the replication of the community-based model.

To fully realize the five year goal requires a skill set we do not have either in-hose or in-country. We need skilled resources and funding partners that are willing to invest in our on the ground development of the replication process and the target organisation(s) in areas that could undertake this.

The immediate approach to these barriers is with our media team to increase the breadth of our messaging to reach more people, more effectively. We have constraints, there are very few marketing creative skills within the country. We have a remarkable story in terms of the maturity of the model and of our achievements, the low absentee rates and number of children getting to university, but we do not have the skill nor the resources to put the story together and spread far and wide. 

We are testing certain messaging with local digital marketing companies and looking to increase effectiveness across the digital channels. Partnerships we are looking for include digital strategists, fundraising and marketing specialists, creative agencies.

The five year plan builds upon this increased scope of messaging across digital channels to reach more potential supporters and skilled resources that can help develop the model replication plan. Current collaboration with undergraduate students from Pennsylvania University has generated foundational plans for model replication.We are now looking at next phase partnerships to create actionable processes for testing and applying a social franchise approach to our model.

Beyond working directly with government institutions and ministries in education, healthcare, social affairs and internal affairs CCF has a wide range of current project partners. 

In education we partner in teacher training and curriculum development with Adobe, University of Nottingham (UK), Christchurch Grammar School and St. Mary's Anglican Girls' school (Australia), and United Way College (Singapore) and Engineers Without Borders (Australia). Education scholarships and training provided by the University of Melbourne and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

For at risk youth who have dropped out of school we are partnering with UNESCO and the Cambodian government on a Basic Education Equivalency Program (BEEP).

Adult literacy is in partnership with Einstrong (USA).

Senior child crimes specialists from the UK police force provide police training as part of our Child Protection unit with certain courses accredited by the Solent University (UK). We are also in initial stages of partnership with Citadel Group (Australia) in developing the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) unit to enhance Cambodia’s growing problem of online child grooming and abuse.

The CCF model of community development and poverty reduction is based on three key principles:

1. Access to quality education for those who have fallen outside the public school system is critical for breaking the generational cycle of poverty.

2. Removing the barriers to education that keep children out of school, such as offsetting the loss of earnings of child labor, addressing urgent food, clean water, healthcare needs, and tackling entrenched gender inequality is vital to ensure that access to quality education is most effective.

3. If children are to prosper, their families must be supported, thus we spend a great deal of time and energy in creating a community environment around the children which is safe, caring, and nurturing, by re-instilling pride, integrity and respect into community members.

The CCF model provides for what educational theory states are the essential and undeniable foundational human needs without which no learning can occur.

Accordingly, we have a beneficiary hierarchy of children, their families and the surrounding community. The core of our work focuses on the ~2,000 children enrolled in our education pathway programs (including nursery, kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, university and vocational training). These programs make up around 75% of our budget with the healthcare, family support and community outreach covering the remaining quarter. Annually we are working with around 2,500 families in the community and in 2019 we reached 12,145 people across all our programs with multiple points of contact in the community.

CCF is a U.S. organization with headquarters in Phnom Penh, plus additional fundraising offices in Australia, Hong Kong and the UK. Our current fundraising strategy is constructed as follows. 

37% - Grants, Foundations and Corporate Partnerships 

27% - Child/Granny Sponsorship

18% - Individual Giving

15% - Events         

3% - Other (Govt, Investment Income)

However, this does not include regular giving that we are currently rolling out and plan to have fully operational by the end of the year. Our aim is to reduce reliance on larger individual donations and partnerships and increase supporter base at lower level giving. Increased digital marketing campaigns and enhanced brand development is where we see this best developed and where we are keen to generate new partnerships.

CCF annual financials can be found on our website currently at https://www.cambodianchildrensfund.org/important-documents/

CCF continues to fundraise through its current channels and looks to increase the number of supporters locally and globally that can support our mission.

CCF's estimated 2020 expenditure budget totals  8,458,053  with 85% on direct program services, 9% on general administrative costs and 6% on fundraising.

While reaching financial sustainability is one of our immediate goals it is something we have structured and is achievable. Where we are hampered is in our single country projects and that we are based operationally in that country. This gives us success programmatically, it is fundamental to how the model operates hand-in-hand with the beneficiaries. However, the country does not have much maturity in terms of marketing and branding and being 97% locally staffed, we do not have the contacts or resources to pitch the potential of our model to the developed countries and places that matter. 

We are applying to the Elevate Prize to help validate and give greater visibility in an area where we do not have the voice. We are looking for the expertise in marketing and branding to bring our voice to the changemakers, the larger funding organizations, bring awareness to the CCF’s successes and ideally provide an opportunity for this to be replicated in other post-conflict communities and environments.

As noted we are keen to reach a larger audience through enhanced marketing and brand awareness. For this we need greater access to resources and skills not currently available to us.

We are keen to connect with the Gates Foundation to look at our model and review the impact of long-term change and cost effectiveness. We believe it has the potential to challenge traditional scale up approaches for a more cost effective community based approach. We’re interested in meeting with Google and the social media industry that can help us in best utilizing their platforms to reach wider audiences. Plus, we would really like to meet these tech leaders who have Foundations that might be interested in adopting and adapting our model - such as the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the Jack Ma Foundation.

Also, we would like to meet the Ad agencies that could work with us to expand the reach of our message.

Academically, we’re looking to partner with institutions such as MIT and Harvard, or get advice as to which institutions are best suited for creating the model replication process and application.