Farming Co-Ops

"We are each of us angels with only one wing and we can only fly by embracing each other."- Luciano de Crescenzo

With every children’s home/school, there will be a profitable co-op with its related income, which will help generate opportunities for growth and development. The Orphan/ Children Fund will maintain ownership and management of the co-op and process facilities to insure that the needed funding will always be available.  
 
The co-ops serve a multi-fold benefit.

• They will support the orphanages and give the children a place to work and learn as they get mature.
  
  
• The children will learn that there is a need to contribute to the larger family or community.
  
  
• The co-op will also bring the community into the bigger picture.
  
  
• The larger community will be given ways to support their families.

This will help them create and maintain a mechanism where they can become a community which is bound to the bigger, global world. In the end Africans and the managers of the NGOs will be jointly caring for the orphans.

Our Agricultural and Vocational Cooperative will include but not be limited to:

1. Supplying the needed equipment and resources to clear the land and to plant and harvest the crops. We will provide the resources to buy the livestock. We will set up the related infrastructure to process the harvests for local and foreign markets.
   
   
2. Crop Co-op: The co-op will legally contract with the family that owns the land. This legal provision will ensure the whole family unit has a safeguard to avoid future hassles and challenges with land inheritance issues. 
   
   As much as five percent of the land will be set aside and given to orphans as they become adults, marry and become involved in beginning their own orphan home. We will contract with the land owner’s family to clear the land. This will be done by organizing the local families that own land, to come together and help one another clear each other’s land; one plot at a time. This will be just one of the ongoing ways we continue to build strong bonds with the local community, NGOs, workers and administrators.
   
   
3. USAID is helping and supplying Orphan/Children Fund with technical advice to farm the crops. The farmer will be given credit against the harvest for the supplies.
   
   
4. The Orphan/Children Fund will purchase the crops from the farmer at fair market price (minus the credit issued) in the field. We will pick up the harvest from the farmers and deliver to the processor. This price will be that day’s market price. The costs = (true costs with no profit). The Orphan/Children Fund will do this in 7 years renewable contracts.
   
   
5. Livestock Co-op: The Orphan/Children Fund will supply the funds and expertise to start a livestock co-op. We will purchase the seed stock and supply the funds needed, to build facilities to raise animals or fish in a humane and environmentally friendly way. We will also use the crop cooperative to help supply some of the feeds to the animal co-ops while concurrently finding the needed markets for the crops produced and taking it to market.
   
   
6. Orphan home/school Plans - We intend to build new facilities as the funds become available to enable children centers to be self-funding. We are committed to raising funds which will enable us to build more accommodations, food, clothing, and education and provide them core necessities. For all children to have a better life, have hope for the future and learn to believe. When each orphan home/school is complete and we are operationally able to sustain ourselves, we will begin Phase Two - Foster Family Homes.
   
   
7. This phase will consist of Foster Family Homes. Studies show that a child raised within a family environment has a better chance to succeed. Each of our family homes will be built to house 10 children with a married foster parent couple as caretaker.

Our goal is to try to duplicate nuclear families. The father will work in the orphanage or co-ops. The mother will be responsible for the smooth operation of the home. When all the children are in school the mother may be needed to help outside the home. The parents will be chosen, trained and supported through our program services.   
 
Implementation of the self-sustaining outreach programs can be implemented through rice milling machines. O/CF has facilitated a relationship with Zaccaria Rice Milling Machines, home-based in Zaccaria, Brazil for this task deliverable.