Help Stateless children achieve Thai citizenship

We are excited to report that 14 months and 10 days after filing the paperwork to apply for Fon's citizenship, she finally got her official Thai Identity card!! We are very excited that this process is completed for her and she will have many more opportunities available to her. Attached is her excited face behind a mask showing off her new card! Fon is an excellent student, with almost straight A's for her whole academic career so far. She is in 10th grade now and with her new card will be able to get scholarships to attend university! We are very thankful for Mimi and Donut, our two new staff members, who took her to pick up her card. 

Since we have begun our partnership with Waterford Community Church, we have expanded our cases significantly. We get calls nearly weekly asking for help with a case. Some cases we are able to provide funding for transportation, some cases we take on ourselves and some cases we give advice for next steps to take for families or foundations trying to help kids in their program. 

Heather will be traveling to the US to visit Waterford Church in May and share all the exciting updates in our citizenship cases. We appreciate your support as well! Thank you for helping us help children reach their full potential. 

As always seems to be the case, November was a very busy month for citizenship cases! We were out of town on cases for 9 days in 3 districts during the month, working on five cases. We also met with three students from a local private school who have not been able to register for their citizenship yet, and took on a case of three students from oa partner organization. These cases will begin in January. 

In December, we will make two trips for two existing cases to complete the paperwork and submit to the province government for approval. Once this approval is granted, the paperwork is then submitted to the national registry to get an ID number. This process takes about a year. We are still waiting on one case that we submitted the paperwork for in February. Her paperwork is still in Bangkok waiting to be assigned a number. We were told it would come by the end of the year, but it doesn't look likely. After the age of 15, the process takes much longer than for those under 15 to receive an ID number because it's a different office that processes them. 

Thank you for your support for this process! We look forward to sharing more good news in 2022.