History and Development
In 2003, two Swiss men, Daniel Siegfried and Marc Jenni, founded Child’s Dream. Before they started to work in the non-profit sector, they were successful bankers, earned a lot of money and enjoyed their lives of luxury. Nevertheless, they were not fully happy and had the feeling that something was missing. According to Jenni it felt like living in a gilded cage. While working, living and travelling in Asia, Jenni and Siegfried got to know the Asian continent and its cultures. During that time they also learned about the problems people outside the banking world face in their daily lives. The more they travelled and got to know the other side of Asia, they harder it got to motivate themselves in their daily jobs. It was time for a change. In 2003 Siegfried and Jenni resigned from their well-paid jobs in banking to pursue their idea of building up an NGO. Jenni and Siegfried decided that the work of Child’s Dream should focus on the Mekong Sub-Region. This region is popular for its opium production, corruption, drug traffic and people smuggling. Therefore, the people living in this region are exposed to poverty, disease, sexual exploitation and political persecution. In 2003, Siegfried and Jenni rented the first Child’s Dream office in Chiang Mai and the Child’s Dream Association was registered as a Swiss charity in Zurich, Switzerland. Only two years later, in 2005, Child’s Dream was also registered as foundation in Thailand. Siegfried and Jenni soon noticed that it is very important to understand the language in order to be able to communicate with the communities and the people they wanted to support; therefore they started to take Thai lessons. Now both of them speak Thai fluently.
Although Child’s Dream is a not-for-profit organisation, it was and still is very important to them that “its administration and financial aspects should be as efficient as possible”. Therefore the different tasks were split, based on the individual strengths of Jenni and Siegfried; Siegfried takes care of all aspects of the project planning and implementation and Jenni of the financial issues. As the amount of donations and implemented projects increased, the number of employees also augmented. In 2007 they only had four employees, for which was the workload too much. In a short time, the number of employees increased and more projects could be realised. Only 2 years later, in 2009, there were already 30 employees; since then the number has been stable.
Read more about this topic: Child's Dream