​Journey to develop the Children’s Smile project

Following the journey of "Giving love - Keeping smiles" in phase 6, the Children's Smile project - belonging to the UEF Service - Learning Center, has marked an impressive journey with memorable moments and great achievements.
The Children’s Smile Project is honored to be accompanied by the units of Home of Communication, Home of Compassion, Ai Linh School of Love and the Tao Dan Social Protection Center. The trust and creating favorable conditions from our partners and children is the driving force to help Children’s Smile constantly reach out in the future.

The Children's Smile Project belongs to the UEF Service - Learning Center with the mission of teaching life skills to children at 4 main homes: Ai Linh School of Love, Home of Compassion, Thao Dan Social protection Center, and Home of Communication. With a combination of online and offline teaching - a flexible coordination between the project and partners in the era of digital transformation. Each stage takes place within 4 months, and up to now, the journey of the Children's Smile project has been reaching the 6th stage.

PARTNER
Community partners of the Children's Smile project are facilities that aim to receive, nurture, take care of and educate orphans.
Although the project has only been operating for just over two years, we have been trusted and cooperated by partners throughout 13 campaigns.
HOME OF COMMUNICATION
The Home of Communication is a charity facility that nurtures orphans and children of ethnic minorities with difficult conditions, which has been operating since 1995 until now.
HOME OF COMPASSION
Mr. Nguyen Minh Man is in charge of the Home of Compassion, established in 2005, to nurture the elderly, disabled and orphans.
AI LINH SCHOOL OF LOVE
In each school year, Ai Linh School of Love accompanies 150 - 175 students in the primary education program with 9 classes from grades 1 to 5.

THAO DAN SOCIAL PROTECTION CENTER 
Thao Dan is a civil society organization established in 1992 by a group of young volunteers to take care of, support and protect street children in Ho Chi Minh City.


Thanks to the professionalism in the organization and distribution of resources, and the lesson plans about quality soft skills, we have been trusted by partners to give the opportunity for UEF students to teach 386 children.
In the past six periods, for the traditional teaching form, the number of teaching sessions in the Home has reached 222 sessions, each session lasted 2 hours.
With the human resources of Children’s Smile, the total number of hours students have spent with the children is up to 97,236 hours. This is an extremely significant number for a community project.
Activities organized by the project for the purposes of fundraising, internal cohesion,... mark the continuous improvement and maturity of each project member in particular and Children's Smile in general to have more stable steps in the future. 

TRIPS
The field trip was organized by Children’ Smile to meet with the aim of allowing the project members to meet the children. 
With the Homes operated in the form of digital transformation, the Children's Smile organized 14 trips to visit the Homes to have a practical approach and understand the children better.

FUND RAISING
The project's fundraising activities are organized by selling products with the announcement that part of the proceeds will be used to improve the quality of volunteer teaching of Children’s Smile project. One outstanding activity of Children’s Smile is fund raising campaign "Selling cakes to feed children", all this money has been used to purchase school supplies and tools for the children in the Home, contributing to improve the quality and learning experience for children. The amount of money raised from this campaign is nearly 7 million dong.

ACTIVITIES
Engagement activities are a "specialty" of the Children's Smile project to connect members together as a family.
Besides, in order to connect members of the Children’s Smile project in general, and the community projects of the UEF Service - Learning Center in particular, Childrens’ Smile monthly organized "Happy Friday" - an internal bonding event.
And there were also feedback sessions to record members' suggestions and feelings after project activities for further improvement and development.

Looking back on the journey of 3 years and 1 path, Children’s Smile is constantly developing and growing stronger in the present and in the future, continuing to pursue the goals and mission of the project and having a longer-term companionship with community partners, children and students.

GROWTH OF CHILDREN’S SMILE PROJECT
From the chart "Growth of Children’s Smile Prọect", the number of students participating in the project is different at each stage, and the largest increase in the number of members is in stage 6. This shows the human resources of the project is growing dramatically to accommodate the number of children being taught in partner homes.

PROJECT COVERAGE ON MEDIA PLATFORMS
With the chart "Project coverage on media platforms", the media publications through each period have changed significantly. In general, the number of posts increases over time but also decreases from stage 5 to stage 6. This indicates a period of growth and progress through communication in social networking platforms but still fluctuating.

LEVEL OF PEOPLE'S INTEREST IN THE CHILDREN’S SMILE PROJECT
In the chart "Level of people's interest in the Children’s Smile project", the level of interaction and number of views of the project increased dramatically, however from phase 5 to phase 6 there was a strong decrease. This shows that people have increasingly paid special attention to the project.