Sponsor a Child!
Families together
For five decades SOS Children has had a primary focus of helping children who do not have parents to look after them (orphans, abandoned babies, wards of court etc.). The SOS Children's model for doing this has been an SOS Children's Village, where groups of children are permenantly placed with a new professional mother, who is trained to help children from difficult backgrounds and build a family. This model has proven hugely successful in terms of outcomes but is a "last resort" solution for a child. Better where possible is to provide the means for children who would otherwise be on the street to stay with their own families. This may mean supporting young single mothers in traditional Middle Eastern countries where they are stigamatised, providing support for older Aids orphans so that they can stay at home and support their younger siblings or providing treatment and training for a young parent with Aids to maintain their family together.
This is the essence of a "family programme": providing the means of keeping children with their own family. Our vision for 2016 is to keep a million more children in a proper family: 100,000 in our Children's Villages and 900,000 in their original family in the community.