About SOS Children's Villages UK
SOS Children's Villages is one of the largest child welfare organisations in the world, providing family-style care for orphaned and abandoned children who have no-one else to care for them.
It is based on the simple idea that every child needs a mother, a family and a home and to be part of a supportive community. Non-political and non-denominational, children are cared for regardless of race, creed, gender or politics.
Worldwide, there are more than 430 SOS Children's Villages in over 125 countries with more being built every day. Each is a community of between ten and twenty family houses in which small groups of children grow up together like brothers and sisters, cared for by their specially trained SOS mother, until they are independent. Here they are given security and a real home and, for many of them, the first love they have ever known in their short lives.
SOS Children's Villages are not just homes for children. Related projects include kindergartens, day nurseries, schools, vocational training centres, social welfare centres, clinics and medical centres. All are open to local people as well, providing invaluable assistance and support for some of the world's poorest communities.
Although the work of SOS Children's Villages is primarily providing long-term care, they are at the forefront in giving emergency aid when disasters strike in areas where they are already active, most recently working with refugees from Afghanistan and with victims of earthquakes and floods in India and Mozambique.
Our history
The Second World War left countless children orphaned and homeless in Europe. Hermann Gmeiner, a young medical student working with them, was determined to find an alternative to the inadequate care they were receiving, believing that what they needed above all was a mother and a family and a home to call their own.
In 1949, he founded the first SOS Children's Village in the little town of Imst in the Austrian Tyrol, funded by his friends and colleagues who made weekly donations of a few schillings. They were the first SOS Children's Villages sponsors. The idea soon spread with more villages being built in Europe.
Then in 1962, Hermann Gmeiner visited Korea, finding a country devastated by war, with thousands of orphaned and abandoned children living on the streets. One gave him a grain of rice for luck – and an idea.
Returning to Austria with two sacks of rice, he started the legendary Grain of Rice campaign and raised enough money to build the first SOS Children's Village in Korea and the first outside Europe.
Today there are more than 430 SOS Children's Villages in over 125 countries, providing a home for 50,000 children, and over 1000 related educational, medical and welfare projects are assisting half a million of the world's most vulnerable children and families.