It’s a GO! — Heartprint

April came in with its usual furnace blast of heat this week! Time to make sure everyone at Heartprint keeps re-filling their water bottles and eating plenty of juicy fruits.

It’s also the Big Lead-Up to Match-it-May. Yep, it’s come around that fast!

We also have really exciting news, so keep reading!
Match-it-May is the fundraiser we have each year that allows us to keep the doors open and the lights on. The donations we receive during this campaign are used solely for overhead: rent, electricity, water, repairs, office supplies, you get the picture. These things aren’t as much “fun” as houses, bikes, swimming lessons, or school uniforms, but we can’t continue offering the latter without the former.

What you generously give during this campaign allows us to spend the other eleven months of the year with a laser focus on our core home and community-building mission.

All the details are here

Now for our Big News!

WE ARE MOVING! We will pick up (maybe literally) our Community Centre and move it to a new location on our old street. We will be bigger and better, all under one roof and for less monthly money.

Our lease expires at the end of this year, so we decided to look at other affordable properties in the neighborhood. You see, our current building doesn’t have room for our Build team and supplies, so they are in a smaller building down the street, for which we pay an additional rent. More importantly, our current street has become busier and more dangerous recently.

So, we are returning to our roots, in a sense. We are returning to the street where we had our first-ever Heartprint House for volunteers and our first little office/community centre. We will have more space, we can all be under one roof, and so many of our children live along this road that they will be safe coming to us without navigating busy streets.

So, Heartprint—and our Community Centre—are evolving yet again. But we always want to remember prior iterations because our evolution has been rapid and supercharged by circumstance.

Some of you will recall that before we even had a Community Centre, we sponsored 23 kids to an English school. Learning English in Siem Reap is essential for young people, as many employment opportunities have traditionally been in the English-dominant hospitality industry.

Around the same time we started building our current Centre, we also started a very small IT programme for youth—just on a Sunday afternoon.

We had a vision - and a Plan - for our Community Centre: We would have a program for parents, focus on vocational training and life skills, and form a youth group.

Then came COVID.

Everyone has their own COVID stories - as do we - and we could go on about it, but suffice it to say that navigation of the challenges and tragedies it wrought led us to a much greater understanding of how we might adjust our pre-pandemic plans to better serve our community during and after.

And so we evolved.

We no longer sponsor kids to English school because we hired a full-time teacher, so now 75 kids can learn instead of 23. And learn better because our Community Centre is English-immersive across all our programs.

We also provide tutoring in Khmer school studies, but let’s be clear. We are not a school!

We are a Community Centre with all that entails. We look at each individual and family, help them determine what will best serve their needs, and also help bring them joy. For some, it is learning building skills or advanced sewing. Others add art or creative writing, or music. Some add all three.

We offer regular STEM classes and retain our Big Sister, Big Brother, and Youth Group programmes. We’ve added Tiny Tots so the youngest in our community can get a head start that might make all the difference.

Of course, our inclusion electives, our Get Active and Healthy, and our nutrition (eat those fruits!) initiatives are staples.

We will have more space as we move to our new location on our old road. We are also planning how to use our existing programmes to provide even more skills to our families.

As our Community Centre kids get older, they can learn business and management skills to supplement everything else. So, we will set up “monitors.” A Shop Monitor to keep track of stock, understand how to price items and keep track of sales, profit, and loss. A Garden Monitor to oversee its maintenance. Perhaps a Nutrition Monitor to help plan the special snacks and treats and serve them up. In whatever endeavor, we will help them learn to manage and make decisions designed for good results.

Still evolving.

We asked all of the kids and our staff what they wanted to be sure we brought from this Community Centre to the new one, and their top choice was the Library! But they also want to keep all of their options and perhaps add some more drama and music. We know the sky is the limit.

We expect to be fully in place by October at the latest. You will know the move is final when the office has officially moved and is set up. It will be the last thing we dismantle, and it will be re-established as fast as lightning when we do move it—because none of the other things happen without the office. It is the Heart of Heartprint.
This brings us back to Match-it-May. Your matching donations—whether from your business or you personally—really do keep the Heartprint Command and Control Centre going all year. Please contribute if you can, especially now when your gift can be multiplied many times over.

As always, thank you,

Heartprint Team