CHARITY: SOS CHILDREN's VILLAGES

Supporting children in need between the sailing races at stopover ports

SOS Children's Villages, also known as SOS Kinderdörfer, is an independent, non-governmental international development organisation, which has been working to meet the needs and protect the interests and rights of children since its foundation by Hermann Gmeiner in 1949 in Austria. Today, the umbrella organisation SOS Children's Villages International is the global federation of 117 national SOS Children's Villages associations - all working together with a single vision: to ensure that every child grows with love, security and respect. The organisation's work focuses on abandoned, destitute and orphaned children requiring family-based child care. Millions of children worldwide are living without their biological families for a variety of reasons including:

parental separation,
domestic violence and neglect,
loss of their parents due to war or natural catastrophes,
disease - including, increasingly, AIDS.

Such children are supported to recover from being emotionally traumatised and to avoid real danger of being isolated, abused, exploited and deprived of their rights. SOS provides about 50,000 such children and 15,000 young adults with a permanent new family, with a '24 hours a day' new SOS mother to provide family-based care. Typically (in the developing world) about ten children are grouped into a house with an SOS mother and between ten and forty of such houses are grouped together as a "Village" with shared facilities. Family groups once formed are kept together as a priority.

Why SOS Children's Villages fits to Henrik in Action

The above vision combined with the facts that the charity has national associations in each country I will visited villages in some of the stopover ports, convinced me to support SOS children’s villages. Stopover ports with SOS children’s villages are the following:

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Cape Town, South Africa
Da Nang, Vietnam

How you can support SOS Children's Villages

As an SOS Children's Villages supporter you make it possible for a child at risk to grow up in a loving home, with good nutrition, health care and a quality education that will prepare him or her for a bright future. You have the following options:

Throughout the next months you will also receive first-hand information from my visits to SOS Children's Villages. Register here for my newsletter to stay up-to-date.