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Background for Open Hands Foundation
 June 2000 husband and wife Tore and Else Bjørg Øglæand were on a 2 month long missionary outreach with "Youth With A Mission" YWAM to Northern Thailand. During this outreach they worked at the Orphanage Grace Home and in a local hill tribe village (Lisu people). Upon their return to Norway after this outreach they started facilitating long distance adoptions of children at the Grace Home orphanage.
By the fall of 2001 second missions outreach to Thailand was completed. The goal of this trip was to strengthen the relationships they already had established, as well as to gather the needed information to further develop their work. On this visit they came in contact with other Orphanages in the slum areas around the city of Chiang Mai. I order to continue supporting the original Orphanages as well as taking on new ones, they saw the need for the establishment of a larger Foundation that would be an active supporter of , work as an information distributor for as well as contribute financially to these different Orphanages.
As a result the Foundation "Open Hands" was founded and registered with the Norwegian government's "Brønnøysund register" October 2002. At this time the official board was also established.
Partner organizations
Open Hands is partnering with the following organizations and people in Thailand:
Homeless Children International (Grace Home orphanage)
Life Development Center, LDC, (Hill Tribe villages)
Partnersworld (Karen and Shan refugees from Burma)
City Gate Church (Coordinate and hosting YWAM teams, Karen village, China etc).
Norwegian Missionaries (Orphanages in Tachileik, Burma and Hoay Maw, Thailand )
Life Development Center
The Life Development Centre (LDC) organization in Thailand, supports community projects among Hill tribe villages in Northern Thailand. They also work among different ethnic minorities, mainly focusing on the Lisu people. LDC's leader Manop Yangja is himself of the Lisu people. The target group for their work is mainly women and children.
Community developement
 LDC's board-members are all local Thais, they have 3 fulltime employees. LDC does health prevention and work to establish self-reliant communities in the different villages. Doing various development projects like rice mills, weaving projects, handicraft projects, fish farms, chicken farms etc. This way they are attempting to reverse the flow of young women who travel to the big cities to find work but in most cases end up in prostitution. (Most of Bangkok's prostitutes do come from these villages.
Strategy:
 Facilitating community development projects is done by establishing independent community groups in the different villages. LCD then visits these groups regularly and do seminars and training etc..
Each of the community groups then contributes 30% of their profit to the community fund, this pot is then divided into 2 parts. 50% as their own security and 50% to the emergency fund in case of flooding ,fire etc. This system gives a good continuity in the different projects and brings the villages closer together. They meet 3 times a year, where each village and community group updates everybody on the present status of their project its economy, plans, problems etc.
Open Hands is financially supporting LDC to be able to continue doing these projects and have in the past given support to projects like the rice mill and handicraft project.
For more information on LDC see this web page : www.ldcl.org
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