by Mary Avant

In mid 2004, child services clinical director and mental health counselor Laura Peterson gave up dealing with the symptomatic problems endemic in the US foster care program and decided to tackle causes. That winter she founded Hands to Hearts International, an organization dedicated to changing the plight of orphaned children around the world; an organization dedicated to changing the condition of impoverished women unable to contribute to their families or their communities.

What drove Peterson out of well paying positions within the US child care system into unpaid work developing child care programs in orphanages in southern India? “I was tired of the fact that we reached kids too late,” she says. “And by too late, I mean children at age five who are already bailing out of multiple foster homes and adoptions, and at age five in the US, taken into their first psychiatric institution with serious mental health issues.

“I wanted to reach the most children at the earliest time in the simplest most cost-effective and most replicable system possible.”

With that formula in mind, Peterson left the US with its entrenched foster care system and traveled to India, a nation which still uses orphanages as the program of choice. Seeing hundreds of untouched babies lying listless in rows of metal cribs, serviced like stock animals by harried, uneducated staff members broke her heart. All too well she knew that there’s a critical window when 90% of brain development happens between age zero and age three and infants can learn attachment and bonding. All too well she knew that with no nurturing touch, love or consistent care-giving, a child’s ability to form intimate, loving relationships is profoundly damaged, perhaps for a lifetime.

The ongoing spiral of depression, mental disorders, abuse, addictions, and criminal activity that often occur as such children grow older had to stop before the cycle of unwed motherhood, failed marriages and relationships, brought more children into the picture, only to be abandoned to experience the same things for yet another generation.

With entrepreneurial determination she formed Hands to Hearts International (HHI), which established a partnership with the Madras Social Service Guild, (MASOS) an orphanage that already had a track record of US and other western adoptions. Instead of focusing on just the problem: untouched, depressed babies, Peterson focused on solutions that could help not only the babies, but local women and their communities as well.

“I’m not a fan of orphanages,” says Peterson. “The reason they exist on our planet is profound and utter poverty, the stigma of unwed motherhood, conflict, and HIV AIDS. But you find that when women have resources and women have empowerment, all those dynamics shift.

So when I designed the program, I wanted it to go way beyond just supporting the children in the orphanages. In fact, I wanted to support communities.”

Today HHI trains and employs disadvantaged women in impoverished communities to act as nannies and fill the gap of care in overcrowded, understaffed orphanages. This win-win situation not only results in children who are healthier, physically and emotionally, mentally and spiritually, but also serves to empower disenfranchised women. With training in caretaking they become better mothers to their own children. They grow in confidence and contribute to the local village economy and gain social stature. They can also afford to send their children to school and give them the opportunity to break out of the cycle of poverty.

Sujatha Balaje Sujatha, was HHI’s first certified local trainer. Thirty years-old, with two children of her own, her mother runs an orphanage and a home and school for street children. Although far more educated than many of the women HHI trains, Sujatha nonetheless has found her life has changed because of the training.

“My life very busy,” writes Sujatha. “I am more interested to give more training for all the organizations. This job is very challenging for me, and I am putting more efforts in, to bring the children (through) with flying colors.

“This has changed the lives of the children very much. We were able to see the difference in milestone developments.”

To pay for the training and employment, HHI works with a local adoption agency near Chennai, which funnels the one-time $3000 adoption fee that comes from the placement of a child with an adoptive US or other western family, into the HHI program. Astonishingly, the annual cost of running the training and employment program for a single orphanage with around 50 children is only $10,000 US. A bargain to say the least. Yet the payoff is even greater.

In India, adoption rules mandate a child must be turned down three times by native families before they can be adopted by a western family. Because of sexual prejudice against female children, discrimination against dark skin tones, and a general inability by native families to afford adopting children with severe health problems, there is no lack of available children. But the rules mandating three turn-downs often condemns children to years of residence in an orphanage - which becomes increasingly unhealthy.

“Normally babies are treated very mechanically,” says Vonda Jump, Senior Research Associate at the Early Intervention Research Institute at Utah State University and curriculum director for HHI. “Nobody comes to pick them up when they cry. And with babies, at first, the only way they communicate is through crying. When nobody answers their cry, they learn that that’s not successful. But they don’t know any other strategies. So they just do nothing and become these very apathetic babies.

“At most orphanages they’re not even treated like they’re human beings. They get fed at certain times. The food is basically shoveled into their mouths by rotating staff. And with that kind of care, it’s very hard for a baby to develop the self regulatory abilities they need to really thrive in this world.”

Orphanages that can hire trained caregivers have babies who are much healthier and happier and more capable of integrating into and bonding with an adoptive family. And the adoptive families have the satisfaction of not only knowing their own baby will be healthier, they have the satisfaction of knowing that their adoption fee will go to help other children in the orphanage.

“I’ve met some of the families that have adopted babies from MASOS before our program was started,” Peterson says. “And they all say ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’re doing,’ because it broke their hearts to have to leave those other babies behind.”

HHI recently completed a second training session in India this year, assisting almost 40 women representing six different orphanages and reaching around 400 babies. Peterson estimates if HHI continues doing one program a month at a different orphanage each month, training about 20 women each time, the ripple effect is “pretty massive.” Already the program is garnering the positive attention of governmental officials, and HHI is preparing to expand into a second country, possibly Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, or Vietnam.

HHI is also looking for investors who can assist the organization in getting new chapters up and running. She estimates most new sites will be self-sustaining within two years.

“I definitely don’t see this as a charity,” she says. “Yes, I hope and dream someday of having a salary…but the majority of our operations are financially sustainable.”

Labeled a social entrepreneur which, she says, “feels a bit daunting,” Peterson all the same, waxes enthusiastic about taking business ideas and applying them to social issues that really can have an impact on a global scale. ”I think there are new ways of doing things,” she says. “I mean, I think the Red Cross does an amazing job. They do phenomenal stuff, as do all the really large NGOs. But I think there’s a lot of individuals at this point, who are working with very sleek, very novel, very unique ways that aren’t just government contracts within the “normal” bureaucratic ways of doing things, that really can make a huge impact.”

Peterson thinks the new social climate, with increasing numbers of investors supporting social entrepreneurial ideas that really can prove results, is the wave of the future. It also is the hallmark of a paradigm shift in consciousness. HHI is just one example of this shift: one person’s vision, drawing to it other individuals of equal compassion and concern for the world as a community, who, with commitment and ingenuity move forward together effecting change.

For more information about Hands to Hearts International go to: www.handstohearts.org