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.