Agape Children's Ministry, established in 1993, is a Christian faith-based organization that reunites street-children and at-risk children with their families. Agape uses an individualized reunification plan for each child to successfully rescue, rehabilitate and reintegrate children back with their families. Initially, Agape began as a traditional children’s home housing 100 former street boys. In 2008, Agape began the process of exploring reintegration as it became evident that the children in their care had living relatives who were willing and able to care for the children in a home setting. Since 2010, Agape has worked to successfully reintegrate over 2,700 children back with family. They currently have two rehabilitation centres in Kenya (Kisumu and Kitale) where they temporarily house and care for the children while they go through the process of rehabilitation and as Agape identify and work with their biological family members to prepare for placement. In addition to Agape's direct work reuniting street and at-risk children back with their families, in 2018 Agape Children’s Ministry began to offer transition support services to other organizations in Kenya that were looking to transition to a family-based care model, instead of institutionalized care. This department within Agape Children’s Ministry, called Agape Model Solutions, seeks to identify, consult and mentor organizations around the country who request support with any issue from rehabilitation programs to social work practices to transitioning their model to one focused on family-based care.
Where they operate
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Organization Size
Headquarters Location
Kenya
Organization Type
Main Areas of Work
Residential Care Service Transition Support
Agape provides individual coaching, mentorship and consulting based on the needs of accepted partner organizations interested in support with rehabilitation programs or transitioning to a family-based care model. This could include helping organizations start a new program, transition their program to family care or family empowerment, or assisting programs to shut down their current residential programs.
Agape strongly desires to support other organizations in transitioning residential care centers to family-based care. They offer the following transition supports:
- Introducing the importance of family care and reintegration to leaders in the organization
- Strategy and planning for the transition
- Donor and board engagement
- Community awareness raising and engagement
- Partnerships
- Government engagement and linking to systems reforms
- Assessments of children and families
- Family tracing
- Preparing children and families for transition
- Social work or case management training or support
- Staffing adjustments or training
- Use of buildings and other assets
- Developing new programs, including:
- Family and community strengthening
- Alternative family care (including kinship care, foster care, adoption)
- Advocacy
- Rehabilitative program for families in children to prepare for reunification
- Provide funding for the transition
- General coaching or consultation
- Onsite training
- Online training
- Onsite visits/meetings
- Phone calls/video conference
- Provision of standards and written guidance or tools for transitioning
- Connecting with others or building a network
Organizations interested in receiving transition support services can apply with Agape Model Solutions. Agape then assess each organization to determine their readiness and level of mentorship or consulting services that they can provide. The assessment also provides guidance for areas of continued growth. Agape provides a partnership approach and supports organizations through training, mentoring, and consultations. Contact info@agapemodel.org to learn more.
Rescue of street or at-risk children
Directly rescue children from the streets or receive referred children from government facilities, parastatal, or non-governmental organizations, bringing these children to the organisation's rehabilitation centres for assessment.
Rehabilitation of street or at-risk children
Provide individualized spiritual, psychosocial, and academic rehabilitation services while child is on campus
Reintegration of street or at-risk children
Identify family members, prepare family to receive the child, and place child back with family members.
Training for other organizations
Agape offers support to other organizations in a wide variety of areas, including formal training for organizations in counselling skills, CSI assessments, reintegration practices, and more. Agape freely shares with other organizations their entire process of Rescue, Redeem, Rehabilitate, and Reintegrate that are done on their campuses. Organizations currently working with street or at-risk children are welcome to come and see the work Agape does on the ground as they share their programs, classes, counseling methodologies, forms, and any other materials used at their residential care facilities.
We asked this organization to tell us a little more about their learning and knowledge sharing practices. Here is what they said
We have 27 years of making mistakes and are constantly striving to improve and better meet the needs of our children and their families. We have worked with thousands of families. We have developed curriculum and tools that have been useful in both the rehabilitation and reintegration departments within our programs. One of the areas we are proud of is still being able to address each child on an individual basis. Each child has unique needs and a unique story. Each child has a reason that led them away from home and has unique needs that need to be addressed in order to prepare them to go back home. Because of our robust case management process, we keep detailed records of all children and their cases. We track family members, classes they completed on campus, assessment results, home visit data, counselling reports, etc. We hold weekly inter-departmental meetings to discuss each and every child on our campus to make sure we are meeting the needs of every child and to make sure that every member of that child’s rehabilitation team is aware of the child’s goals and plan for reintegration. It is a long process, but the success that God has enabled us to see is largely because we treat every case differently depending on the circumstance.
Since 2008 when we started the journey towards reintegration, we have learned so much as an organization about the importance of keeping children in families. We have learned how to come alongside families and work towards restoration and enable them to better care for their children after reintegration. We have learned the importance of close follow-up and continuous follow up with families after placement. We have walked alongside thousands of children and families in the last 12+ years and learned better ways to support children at home, whether they are going back to school or entering informal apprenticeships. We have learned how to encourage families to take responsibility for their own children and take the lead in parenting the children instead of having a permanent dependent relationship on Agape to continue catering for all the child’s needs after placement. It’s been 12+ years since we started the process, and we are still learning and growing and changing how we do, track, and report on home visits in order to better meet the needs of children and their families, especially after placement.
For other organizations considering starting reintegration, we would encourage you to start now and start small. If there are children in your facilities now that have known family members, start visiting those family members and assessing their readiness and willingness to receive the child back home. Start doing family tracing and identifying safe homes for the children. Have the children start going for visits to the family and doing a “trial” stay at home as you slowly work towards placement. Start with some of your “easier” cases first where family members are known and close so you can visit frequently and monitor the case closely as you begin. But, we encourage these organizations to start the process now and start slowly. Research shows and we have personally seen that, for these children, family is BEST.
One of the ways that we continue to reflect on and evaluate the work is by meeting as inter-departmental teams on a frequent basis to discuss cases and talk over issues and plan for changes together. We have a large number of staff with multiple roles and responsibilities, and it is important to us to build in time several times a week for colleagues to meet and debrief together as well as managers to meet on a weekly basis to discuss individual child’s cases and talk over gaps in their programs and plan together for how to better equip and train our staff. We are constantly striving to identify areas of improvement and work together as an inter-departmental team to make necessary changes and then monitor the effect of those changes. Also, we strive to keep our staff connected between our campuses. If our Kitale location implements a new process or program and finds it to be effective, our staff are very connected between locations so we can share best practices and make sure there is continuity between programs. Staff frequently travel between campuses to do continued monitoring and training to make sure programs are running smoothly and similarly in both locations. Managers of similar departments in both locations have weekly or bi-monthly calls to share what is working or not working and get support from their peer on how to handle challenging cases or situations.
Agape Children’s Ministry is involved closely with other organizations doing similar work in both Kisumu and Kitale. In both cities, we are involved in the leadership of consortiums of organizations doing work with street children. There, we can share together about the challenges faced in the work and share together between organizations, both about issues we are facing and need support with as well as practices we have implemented that we encourage others to try as well. We have a close relationship with the government as well, and stay closely connected with Kenya’s Department of Children’s Services and Children’s Protection Unit (police) in the area. With these government offices, we can share our challenges, receive support and advocate for policy changes that would better meet the needs of street-connected children.
Our social work staff are in the field doing home visits four days a week. During these home visits, we connect with local administration and government offices, schools, churches, and other leaders in the community. We are meeting directly with children and families in order to guide and mentor the children as well as hear challenges faced at the family level and understand better how to support individual families. We also can share with larger groups of children at schools about the dangers of street life and hear some of the challenges facing children within their communities that are common push/pull factors to the streets. By knowing some of these factors, we can work to address some of the underlying reasons that are bringing children to the street and hopefully provide supports in communities that would decrease the runaway rate of children.