Home and Homes for Children is a UK-based charity that works to close orphanages and get the children inside them back to family.
Around the world, more than 5.4 million children are confined in orphanages, even though 80% of them have family they could be living with if they had the right support.
Hope and Homes for Children works in more than 10 countries across Europe, Africa and Asia to give children and families the support they need and change the systems that are putting children in institutions.
Their teams are helping families to stay together or be reunited, and creating new families through fostering and adoption, so that every child can grow up in a safe, loving environment where they can thrive.
They are also working with local authorities, governments and international bodies like the UN and EU to improve their policies and end the institutionalisation of children forever.
To contact Hope and Homes for Children, please fill out the contact form available here.
Where they operate
Headquarters Location
East Clyffe, Salisbury
Wiltshire
SP3 4LZ
United Kingdom
Organization Type
Main Areas of Work
What They Do
Keeping Families Together – Where war, poverty, discrimination or broken systems put pressure on parents to give up their children, Hope and Homes for Children fight to keep families together. Working with care and compassion, listening and understanding, they let families know there’s someone who cares about their situation, and provide them with the hope and support they need to keep their child within their family home.
Reuniting Families – Millions of parents are longing for the children they have been separated from. And children who could be back at home are lost in the bureaucracy of an orphanage. Through local teams including family tracing experts and specialist social workers, Hope and Homes for Children and their partners reconnect children with their loved ones. And once children are reunited, they stay by their side to help them adapt to their new life together.
Creating New Families – Hope and Homes for Children supports children whose birth families can’t look after them or keep them safe, or those who have no family at all. They work with individuals and authorities to find, train and support foster or adoptive parents: adults who they know from experience will love, protect and give security to a child. With their social workers, psychologists and educationalists by their side, new parents can give children the love they need to grow up and thrive in life.
Closing orphanages - Closing an orphanage for good is an extremely complex process that can take many years to complete. Hope and Homes for Children teams work with a range of local and national authorities and organisations - including local councils, community leaders, medical professionals and child protection authorities - in order to achieve that life-changing moment when an orphanage is closed for good and the children once confined within it are instead Back to Family.
Advocating for change - Many governments and regional authorities still use the institutionalisation of children as a childcare solution. By making them aware of the immense harm that placing children in institutions does, and showing the positive impacts that family-based care brings, Hope and Home for Children’s advocacy team is working to change attitudes and reform child care practices on both a national and international level.
HHC Advisory Services - drawing on their global operational delivery and partnering experience, Hope and Homes for Children provides a compelling package of technical support services to governments, UN agencies, local and international NGOs in other countries around the world. They work to bring about the transition of children’s care and protection systems to family-care. They support local initiatives, under local leadership and capability. Their focus is on locally owned, sustainable solutions and impact at scale. They are passionate about protecting the rights of all children, to see them brought up in safe, loving, nurturing families.
Organization Resources
This briefing paper seeks to address key misunderstandings about de-institutionalisation. It explains what it is and what it is not and addresses key questions often asked about the need for such institutions, the role they play and the impact of this transformation and what it entails.
This paper aims to raise awareness on the perverse effects of institutionalisation on children and it calls for comprehensive system reforms, starting with a transition towards family and community-based care. It highlights country level lessons learnt in the European context that demonstrate how deinstitutionalisation can be achieved in practice.
Hope and Homes for Children has been implementing ACTIVE Family Support in Sarajevo Canton in BiH since 2003. The program consists of two elements: the prevention of separation of children from their parents as the primary focus, and the reintegration of separated children from institutions back into their biological families. This unique and holistic program is tailored to the individual needs of each child and family and it is built on the following core values: partnership, respect, inclusion, sustainability and the best interest of the child.
Joint statement among UN agencies and NGO partners to build greater consensus on the importance of child-sensitive social protection.
