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Alumni Hall of Fame Profile:

Clark Jensen compelled by the value ‘as precious to God as our own’

By California State University, Bakersfield

February 16^th, 2021

This is one in a series of 2021 CSUB Alumni Hall of Fame profiles.

Clark Jensen was on a trek to one of the world’s highest villages, in the Himalayas of Northern India, when community members made a startling request:

Could you take home a boy who’s been sold by his parents?

The boy’s parents were Tibetan refugees from a Chinese crackdown on their religion and culture. They’d run out of money and, to survive, sold the boy to the village as a slave.

“I don’t know for sure how old he was because he didn’t know,” Jensen said. “Probably somewhere between eight and 12 years old. And nobody wanted to care for him; he was more of a problem.”

The most common approach to caring for children like this boy was to place them in an institution, so Jensen helped establish children’s homes there and around the region. But the outcomes proved disappointing, so Jensen rethought the approach.

The result was Global Family Care Network.

The international nonprofit Jensen founded in 2007 prioritizes community-based solutions toward the protection of children and strengthening of families. Instead of putting abandoned children in orphanages, for example, the organization works to restore children to their biological families or long-term family-based care when this is not possible.

“That’s why we’re called Global Family,” Jensen said. “It’s the idea that all children deserve a family.”

Today, the Bakersfield-based organization helps establish and provide resources to projects in India, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Scotland, Canada and the United States, and has expanded from after-the-fact care to prevention and intervention.

Global Family has team leaders throughout the world who start and operate shelters, education centers, prevention programs and empowerment clubs serving children and families. Pictured are awareness campaign activities in Myanmar.

Jensen is Global Family’s chief visionary officer while his wife, Jennifer, is executive director. The organization has more than 300 team members around the world and is supported by grants and corporate and individual donations, the vast majority from Kern County. Its current focus is a center in Scotland training others to follow its best practices.

“What Clark has said to me is that every child is as precious to God as our own,” said Greg Heyart, a longtime friend and member of Global Family’s Board of Directors. “They don’t just say that, Clark and Jennifer, they really, really live that.”

Lessons learned in Bakersfield

Jensen grew up in Grand Junction, Colo., where his dad was a successful builder and his mother a homemaker. He describes a privileged upbringing during which he played a lot of sports and attended church four to five times a week.

“That was pretty much my life, Jesus and football and basketball and wrestling, everything but baseball,” he said.

When the 1970’s oil crisis caused the local economy to collapse, Jensen’s dad’s business suffered and the family moved to California. Jensen attended community college in Santa Cruz and then Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, where he majored in anthropology and worked as a carpenter.

There he met Jennifer; their first date was to Disneyland. Once engaged, when Orange County proved too expensive, they moved to Bakersfield where Jennifer’s father pastored a church.

Jennifer and Clark Jensen at a ‘Best of Bakersfield’ gala fundraiser for Global Family Care Network.

Jensen took a job measuring people for wedding suits at Mr. Tuxedo and enrolled at CSUB. The Anthropology Department welcomed and embraced him even though he aspired to do missionary work, which many anthropologists find “repugnant,” Jensen said.

Jensen loved the vigorous debate at CSUB, saying it challenged his thinking and made him a better student. He remembers the day in October 1995 when the OJ Simpson verdict was read. The students in his mostly white class decried the jury’s finding while the students in the mostly Black class down the hall cheered.

“I walked outside, and it was just this moment of intrigue and realizing that depending upon your experiences, depending upon your background and what you have gone through, you see the world in very different ways,” he said.

Jensen earned two anthropology degrees from CSUB, his bachelor’s in 1992 and his master’s in 1999.

Jensen with Mother Theresa in the early 1990s, during his second trip to India.

Jensen was drawn to communities in Bakersfield populated by at-risk children, and he and members of his church partnered with Teen Challenge to establish after-school programs. They bought four or five trucks, staffed them with volunteers, and put on puppet shows and educational programs. They called it Kids Clubs.

“We’d do it in a different neighborhood each day of the week,” Jensen said. “Collectively, thousands of kids were coming to Kids Clubs and learning positive messages like don’t take drugs and also developing relationships with people.”

He also spent time with parents of the children in the clubs at the Rancho Bakersfield Motel, offering coffee, donuts and prayer. For the first year, they responded with, “no, we’re fine,” every time Jensen asked if he could pray with them. Then one finally answered with, “You can pray for me. You probably don’t know, but I’m a drug addict.” Others similarly chimed in.

Jensen learned a lot about marginalized communities from his work in Bakersfield, especially that you must invest time in earning people’s trust before they will accept help.

Treking in India

The Jensens moved to India with their then 5-year-old daughter, Charity, and 2-year-old son, Courtland, in 1999. They settled in the foothills of the Himalayas and Clark traveled around the region doing missionary work.

Jensen with his son, Courtland, daughter, Charity, and wife, Jennifer, during their first year living in North India, in Mussoorie.

It was during one of those treks that Jensen came across the abandoned boy, and along with other missionaries did what everyone did back then: started children’s homes. After a couple of years, though, he and Jennifer learned that wasn’t the best approach.

“All of a sudden there were like 40 boys and we didn’t feel like they were receiving the level of care that we would certainly want if that were our son,” Jennifer Jensen said.

So instead, Jensen worked to find foster families in the local Indian communities, a challenge because of its caste system and long history of developing orphanages. One of their most important innovations was to not compensate the caregivers, showing children they were not being taken in for money and ensuring caregivers had the best intentions for the kids.

In India, Global Family also has an education program in a large railroad slum community called Jal Vihar. It offers schooling, literacy and health programs, food and coordination of other community works. Global Family India also runs a 25-bed shelter for young girls who’ve been trafficked and systemically abused that has now served almost 1,000 girls.

Jensen with Global Family India’s Lead Coordinator, Vincent Bernard, and girls who have graduated from an education program there.

The Jensens were in India for eight years. During that time, Jensen also established Hope Alliance India, which provided disaster relief. After the Christmas Day 2004 Asian tsunami, Jensen travelled to Sri Lanka and the Maldives to rebuild homes, electrical systems and other devastated infrastructure.

A move, and an expansion

In 2008, the family moved to Kathmandu, Nepal, where Jensen opened a drop-in center where young ladies who’d come from villages seeking work could have tea, play games and enjoy conversation. Many of them became involved the sex trade or slave labor and were abused.

Six women managed to leave that life — no easy feat given many were supporting whole families back home in the village — and Jensen created a business that trained and employed them in sewing and tailoring. He also gave them ownership in the company, Purnaa, which he later sold for just one Nepali rupee.

Nepal is also where Global Family broadened its approach to prevention and intervention, launching the Daughter Project. The project includes girls’ empowerment programs, shelters to provide therapeutic healing to young survivors of human trafficking and exploitation, long-term family care for children unable to return to their biological families, and counseling and job training to young women no longer enslaved in brothels.

The Jensens, second and third from right and middle, pose with others at a Southern Asia Annual Retreat in Kathmandu, Nepal several years ago.

The Daughter Project’s approach is to help and empower communities to find their own sustainable solutions to the issues causing family disintegration and child trafficking and/or labor. One of Clark Jensen’s favorite stories is about a group of girls at a Nepali government school who wanted to stop male teachers from punishing and shaming them by, in front of class, placing their hands in the blouse pockets that were over their breasts.

The girls knew they couldn’t just complain to the administration that the behavior was perverted or unwanted, Jensen said. Instead, they convinced the headmaster to remove the pockets from female uniforms.

“(The headmaster) knew what was going on, this was a solution he could help realize without confronting the teachers,” Jensen said. “And so it worked, they and he agreed, and then multiple schools in the region all did the same thing and altered the female uniforms.”

“The girls came out feeling empowered.”

VIDEO: Jennifer Jensen discusses Global Family and The Daughter Project on KERO Channel 23 in Bakersfield

Global Family has also helped women’s clubs form cooperatives that generate enough extra income for them to care for and educate their daughters. Other examples include men’s groups that made a pact not to let traffickers come into their villages and take their girls.

In addition to prevention clubs across the nation, Global Family Nepal has a 10-bed shelter for children rescued from traffickers and other systemic abuse providing not only housing but therapeutic services while efforts are made toward family reunification. In addition, there is a long-term family home for eight girls who were abandoned and unable to return home. GF Nepal’s lead coordinator, Suren Rasaily, has been invited by the government to participate in writing the country’s new foster family care law.

Jennifer Jensen with children in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Jensen has taken hidden cameras inside the brothels where many children grow up so people can understand the depth of their trauma. There are children of sex workers running around, he said, and the women have blank stares in their eyes “like their souls have left.”

“The psychological approaches, we’re just diving into that,” Jensen said. “Diving into some really cool stuff around hope and the idea of returning hope to a person and helping them be able to see an alternative version of their future and what they can become.”

Global Family works not just overseas but in Bakersfield, where it operates the Daughter Project Girls’ Home, a residential facility providing intervention and therapeutic services to young girls in crisis, survivors of human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.

“We’re a very high-level trauma shelter, which means we can care for girls that have been highly traumatized,” said Heyart, the Global Family board member. “We have a safe place for them to live. We have therapy for them. We have all kinds of resources for these girls to get back on track and to be able to get back out into society and live productive lives.”

The Daughter Project Girls’ Home in Bakersfield operates a 10 bed therapeutic shelter for girls in the foster care system who have been commercially sexually exploited or are in immediate crisis.

Global Family estimates it’s seen nearly 200,000 people participate in prevention clubs educating them about human trafficking and child sexual abuse, and empowering them to protect themselves. It says it has cared for more than 1,500 victims of trafficking and exploitation in rehabilitation centers and reunited close to 2,100 children with their families.

“Clark’s worldwide impact cannot be quantified, nor can it be understated,” Charity Jensen wrote about her father being nominated for the CSUB Alumni Hall of Fame. “Throughout his career, he has had an impressive and large global influence that has helped thousands of individuals affected by poverty, exploitation and abuse.”

Expanding its reach

To multiply Global Family’s impact, Jensen founded and serves as director of the St. James Research Centre in Scotland. It provides resources and training to those interested in fighting and preventing human trafficking; rehabilitating victims of commercial sexual exploitation; caring for families and orphans; doing community development work; and managing nonprofits.

The center is also a hub for research and collaboration with others to share best practices, sharpen their work, and develop new approaches.

“There are a lot of ways childcare organizations can go,” Jennifer said. “One is, ‘Let’s help more kids, let’s be more places, and grow, grow, grow. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But we decided we would rather have models in the major cultural contexts of the world and then be able to share and multiply that way.”

In the summer or fall, the Jensens plan to launch efforts in a new country that they aren’t ready to announce. Global Family is interested in expanding to the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe.

Global Family is supported by government grants and corporate and individual donations, a majority of which come from Kern County residents. Here are Clark, Jennifer and Charity Jensen at one of its gala fundraisers.

One thing the Jensens want to make clear is that Global Family is a Kern County organization. It wouldn’t exist without the support of its residents.

“Kern County should feel ownership of it,” Jennifer said. “It’s amazing to see what we (all of us) have accomplished here at home, and what we’ve been able to do around the world — and counting.”