SUP-C running for the second year!

first and foremost, allow me to introduce ourselves. Step-Up Project Cambodia started last year where we work with Solutions To End Poverty(STEP),an NGO and their partnering school PSE. Our project is about edible landscaping where we aim to create a prototype garden that can help ease the food scarcity and beautify the school. The skills and lesson learnt from the creating of this prototype will be transferred to SMILE village which was created with the collaboration with Habitat for Humanity and Pour un Sourire d’Enfant (PSE).

A little bit about our partners:

STEP started in 2009 with the vision to create a Poverty-free, sustainable communities where people live with dignity and in harmony. STEP is currently working with Pour un Sourire d’Enfant (PSE), a NGO in Cambodia, to relocate impoverished families, displaced due to urban development, to SMILE vallage a 2.2 hectors of land at Dongkor district, Phnom Penh. Most of the families that lives in slums, scavenge and collect garbage for a living, and all live in severe poverty. Hence, there is a need to locate them and build them a community. The families will also receive skills-training, community-building programs as well as alternative livelihood programs to ensure that the community is sustainable after the NGO leave.

For this project, STEP is collaborating with many other NGOs besides PSE, ranging from the Department of Landscape Architecture from the National University of Singapore (NUS), Garden and Landscape Centre, architecture firm Collective Studio, Grenzone and Habitat for Humanity. The significance of this project goes beyond solving a housing problem. It is also more than rebuilding lives of an entire community. STEP hopes that it will eventually lead to a prototype for sustainable community development for the poor throughout Cambodia.

PSE: Pour un Sourire d'Enfant

Pour un Sourire d'Enfant (PSE), a French humanitarian association, which has been working for the last sixteen years in Cambodia, has a vision to empower of each Cambodian child to become a master of his or her own destiny . PSE helps extremely impoverished children, who do not go to school, who are mistreated and forced to work in the most distressing and dangerous conditions as scavengers. Today, PSE has more than 450 local employees in Cambodia who are employed as teachers, trainers, social workers, doctors, cooks, program coordinators and many others. They provide the students with education to help them break the poverty cycle and move on to improve their standard of living.

Collaborating with PSE in this project will allow participants a platform to interact and understand the combodian society better. As the students in the higher grades and vocational school is around the same age as the participants, it is easier to interact and learn from each other. Participants will also learn the roles and effectiveness of an NGO.

Here is a video of last year's project and fun!