Children eating lunch at Children's Village Piliyandala, Sri Lanka.…
This lunch is in the home of one of the families helped by SOS Children's Village program to prevent the abandonment of children.
- Lisa
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Children eating lunch at Children's Village Piliyandala, Sri Lanka.
This lunch is in the home of one of the families helped by SOS Children's Village program to prevent the abandonment of children.
By working with local communities and government authorities the charity is able to provide vulnerable families with the skills to ensure long-term self-reliance and the protection and care of their children.
Initial assistance is achieved through counseling services, job training, home economics skills, income-generation and food security projects.
In addition, these programmes aim to support the wider community to self-organise, develop and sustain its own responses to the needs of vulnerable children and their families.
By rooting our programmes firmly within local communities, we work towards meeting families' long-term needs so that children may look forward to a safe and healthy future.
In July 2003, SOS Children's Villages Sri Lanka started its first pilot project helping families and community development in Piliyandala.
Participating families organise themselves to provide children with a nutritious daily meal and give extra after school tutoring.
An SOS Mothers' Club provides the main impetus for the community development, with local women working together to improve both their own and other disadvantaged community members' living standards.
The club has created considerable enthusiasm within the community to extend a helping hand to their needy neighbours. Classes in income-generating skills, such as sewing, patchwork and fabric painting, are offered enabling members to start up their own cottage businesses.
- Mary
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A portrait of girl swinging at Children's Village Tbilisi, Georgia.
The story of SOS Children's Village Tbilisi is that following the break-up of the former Soviet Union the situation in Georgia deteriorated to such an extent that more and more children had to fend for themselves on the streets.
Circumstances were further worsened by the Abkhazian and South Ossetian conflicts which took place in the early 1990s.
The construction of the first Georgian SOS Children's Village was completed in Tbilisi on October 1996.
Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, is located in the east of the country. The SOS Children's Village Tbilisi is situated in the western part of the capital.
The second SOS Children's Village in Georgia was built in Kutaisi, in the western part of the country, and was completed in autumn 2002.
In 2005, SOS Childrens Villages Georgia launched programmes to support local families who are at risk of abandoning their children and enable children to grow within a caring family environment.
Together with local authorities and other service providers, SOS Childrens Villages supports families and helps them to take good care of their children.
The SOS Children's Village is located next to a residential area, where some small food stores and secondary schools can be found.
The adjoining SOS nursery is open to the children from the neighbourhood and consists of five group rooms, a kitchen and a gym; it can cater to up to 100 children.
A computer room was set up in one of the local schools as an SOS Social Centre, where various computer courses are offered to up to 260 students per year.
The SOS Youth Facility in the centre of Tbilisi can accommodate up to 29 youths, who live there during their vocational training or higher education and prepare themselves for an independent life.
The charity also offers the local community access to essential services for childrens development (eg. educational, nutritional and health support) and supports families to protect and care for their children by linking families with income generating activities.
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