Orphan Care Compass
Practical help for the ministry you’re actually leading
Your ministry is unique. The guidance you receive should be too.
Orphan Care Compass learns about your ministry, understands how you serve children and families, and brings you practical ideas drawn from the experience and knowledge of the orphan-care community.
A conversation partner
OCC is a conversation partner, not a judge.
OCC works from public information and what you tell us. It will never know your ministry as well as the people living the work every day.
Its job is not to grade you. Its job is to help you see possibilities.
A recommendation might
- Confirm something you’ve already been thinking about
- Surface a question your team has not considered
- Point you toward a useful resource
- Identify a lesson from another organization
- Help you think differently about an existing program
- Give your team a practical next step
And sometimes a recommendation may simply not fit your situation. You decide what’s useful.
Begin with what matters
Start with the child or family outcome
The evidence and metrics matter—but they come after the human outcome.
- Are children able to remain safely in families?
- Which young people are struggling as they transition into adulthood?
- Which church partners are becoming stronger and more self-sustaining?
- Which livelihood approaches are creating lasting household stability?
- Which children are beginning to struggle before they fall behind?
- What is working especially well in one program or country that another could learn from?
$75K ≠ $5M
Realistic guidance
The recommendations should fit your capacity
A volunteer-led ministry operating on $75,000 should not be told to build the systems of a $5 million international NGO.
OCC uses your approximate operating capacity to make its guidance realistic. That affects both what OCC reasonably expects to find and what practical next steps it recommends.
From idea to action
Show Me How
A good recommendation is not enough if you do not know how to act on it. When a recommendation matters to you, Show Me How can help translate the idea into practical next steps.
The goal is not to create more work. The goal is to make a useful idea easier to act on.
- Use records you already have
- Ask a few better questions
- Compare results across several programs
- Review what stronger partners are doing differently
- Test one change before expanding it
- Find outside expertise or resources
Where the wisdom comes from
Technology helps organize the knowledge. People are the source of the wisdom.
- Experienced practitioners
- Social workers
- Ministry leaders
- Churches
- Researchers
- Networks
- Funders
- Nonprofit specialists
- Organizations with years of experience serving children and families
Try Orphan Care Compass
Begin with your ministry
Share your ministry website and approximate annual operating budget to begin the conversation. If your organization has research, tools, training, examples, or practical experience that could help another ministry, we also want to learn from you.
Continue with Telos
Visit our conversation page to choose the path that best fits your ministry or contribution.