About SOS Children

SOS Children (www.soschildren.org) gives children a family for life.  We are the world's largest orphan charity, with over 518 unique villages in 124 different countries. 

We provide orphaned or abandoned children with a supportive family environment, with specially trained SOS mothers providing round-the-clock care in purpose-built family houses.

On top of this we run a lot of community programmes, often located in or around our SOS Children's Villages.  We run Family Strengthening Programmes, which aim to help the wider community, SOS Medical Centres and SOS Schools.

Many of our SOS Schools are directly linked, or even located within, our SOS Children's Villages.  We offer child and village sponsorships, if you want to support an individual child or village (this will include supporting their education costs).  You can also support/sponsor an SOS School itself.

Supporting (Sponsoring) SOS Schools

You can help SOS Children educate some of the world's poorest children and give them the skills they need to escape poverty. If you are interested in helping to pay for the construction of a new school, then please get in touch with us (info@soschildren.org). At present we are fundraising for several new schools around the world including one in Gambia and one in Zambia.

If you would like to raise money for the ongoing costs of a school, then we would be delighted. If you wish, we can guarantee that 100% of your contribution will be sent to a given school (our administration costs are more than covered by people who say they are happy paying for these). There is an audit structure to ensure that all the money is wisely spent out there.

Please though, remember if you give very detailed restrictions on how money should be spent (e.g. "only on maths books") you make a considerable amount of work for us and our auditors tracking that this request and all other requests happened. Depending on the size of the donation and the instructions we may have to refuse. Obviously this does not mean we do not buy maths books! Please also speak to us before collecting anything other than money for us. Old school books in particular, whilst valuable out in the developing world, can cause such costs in transport and import customs/duty and end up being more expensive than buying new ones out there.

If you wish to sponsor a school, that's great. But to keep admin and accounting costs low, essentially you will be sponsoring (and will get information on) all the projects we have at a given location including the school, but also any medical centres, clinics, social centres, AIDS orphan community programs, Children's Village, vocational training centres etc. We hope you understand this.

If you think this is unimpressive please be practical and think through where to stop. Our admin costs per sponsor are under £1 per sponsor per month, including translating documents where necessary and so on. We do not want this to rise and want people to understand that we would rather be given the freedom to spend the money as needed at any moment and spend our time solving the children's problems!

If you are able to set a sponsorship up from a direct debit then fill in our online sponsorship form and fill in instructions with what you want us to do. If you intend to fundraise in your school to raise the sponsorship then talk to us and we will work some practical arrangement out.

Volunteering

If you have teaching qualifications and are interested in volunteering in one of our schools, please look at our volunteering opportunities. If you have a specific idea of what you may be able to do, and are able to commit for a significant period of time, then we may be able to help you.