FAQsOur Approach
CRY America’s Theory of Change
CRY America and its partners are dedicated to building a just society for children. We believe that doing so requires concerted action by all sectors - state, market and civil society. CRY America’s operating model, therefore, is based on building a cross-sectoral coalition that includes individuals, corporations, the media, the government and development partners who serve children in need.
The following assumptions are implicit in CRY America’s theory of change:
- Children are the most vulnerable segment of any society. Their situation provides both, the most stringent metric of a society’s health and the rallying point with the widest appeal across all parts of society.
- Ensuring child rights, therefore, provides the most effective, sustainable solution to the myriad social, economic and political issues confronting India and the world in general.
- Sustainable change at the level of the community is only possible when communities themselves discuss, engage, develop and implement solutions, cooperatively.
- Non-profits when linked to each other and in coalition with business, government and media, can create a critical mass that achieves immense synergies and scale, and the strength to influence policy.
CRY America’s Approach:
CRY America has learned that the only way to enable meaningful and lasting change in the lives of children is to adopt what we call the ‘child rights approach’ which entails:
- looking at children’s issues holistically and from a human rights perspective - rather than through the narrow prisms of education, health, child labor, child abuse, feticide/ infanticide etc.
- addressing the underlying root causes of deprivation and larger community issues – gender, caste, livelihoods, displacement and the like
- engaging underprivileged communities to find long-term solutions to these problems and work with local government agencies to ensure that relevant government policies that programs that guarantee their rights are effectively implemented.
CRY America supports underprivileged communities and their children in India, including dalits, tribals and religious minorities.
CRY America amplifies the voices of underprivileged communities and children and plays a catalytic role between two groups of people:
[a] development organizations and individuals working at the grassroots-level with underprivileged children and their communities
AND
[b] people like you, coming together from all walks of life who believe in the restoration of rights of children.
We harness the support, money, time, skills of thousands of people in the USA who provide resources and deploy this dedicated fieldworkers across India struggling to function for lack of them. CRY America is an 'enabling' organization, as opposed to an 'implementing' one.
