1. What have you learned about the community your organization works with?
Khom Loy Development Foundation, based in Chaing Rai, works with any and all ethnicities,
regardless of religious or cultural backgrounds. We, KLDF staff, are very keen to help support the
refugees and the ethnic marginalized migrant workers interested in collaboration schools, families,
or other organizations that serve migrants in and around Mae Sot. During this month, I have learned
so many things about the community my organization works with. In contrary, some migrant schools
have been facing many difficulties such as the schools’ finance, transportation, communication with
donors, cooperation with other organizations and migrant schools, etc. While the other schools have
motivated leaders who are able to support their schools by providing essential basic skills and other
capacities for the students, some schools do not have those leaders or principles. For example,
among them, Hway K’ Lote migrant school, located in Mae Pa, has been a good role model for the
other migrant schools because the school has a very active and energetic leader and other
motivated teachers who are able to improve a better education for the students by providing
courses, and other essential skills. Thus, the parents from Burma are willing to send their children to
school due to better educational system and collaborative structure. On the other hand, I have
learned about the two migrant schools, Heavenly Home and Dominican, which are homes for the
orphanages. These orphanages do not have anyone who will take care of them. However, each
school principle and other school staff have been trying to fulfill the desirable impacts to live in.
Therefore, these are some backgrounds of how migrant’s qualities of life are in and around Mae Sot.
How does your organization seek to support the positive development of this community?
There are two branches of KLDF’s focus, Uplift Initiative Program and Montessori Education Project.
Uplift is a program designed to empower communities on the Thai-Burma border that lack food
security, opportunities for income and education. Through the use of small grants and skills
trainings, these families receive the opportunity to pull themselves out of poverty without having to
rely on external aid indefinitely. It also focuses on funding easy-to-replicate low cost solutions for
ethnic minorities in the fields of education, agriculture and income generation. Therefore, this
project aims to improve the condition of the livelihoods for those marginalized people. It also offers
the students an opportunity to learn about agriculture and income generation by working together.
Therefore, KLDF always tries to find very good processes that can be repeated very easily. For
instance, we try to find out the schools’ challenges existing in community and then try to find
solutions to constraints. That is what we have been trying to set up IMOs workshops and writing
proposal trainings for the migrant schools. In IMOs workshops, we helped the participants how to
make IMOs liquid fertilizers by using low cost natural products which can be found easily around the
environment. In my perspective, it is the best solution for those who cannot effort to buy chemical
fertilizers, and pesticides for the gardens. It is also inexpensive and effective to use those natural
fertilizers in the gardens which can provide nutritious food for the migrants. I feel delighted to work
with this organization because I will have a chance to learn about integrated farming, pig rearing and
other sustainable project which will be helpful for me to get experience and apply them to help my
community. In the future, we hope that
Reflect on how a task you have worked on this month assists the organization in reaching its goals in
the positive development of this community?
Related to this question, we try to prioritize which school has the most needs