About SOS Children’s Villages

SOS Children’s Villages is an independent, non-political and non-denominational international children’s charity.

A pioneering idea

In 1949, Hermann Gmeiner realised a simple yet pioneering idea with the construction of the first SOS Children’s Village in Imst, Austria: Every child needs a mother and grows most naturally with brothers and sisters in their own house within a village community.

The aim of every SOS Children’s Village is to prepare children for an independent life and to support them until they can stand on their own two feet. Every child receives schooling and vocational training tailored to their individual needs. SOS Children’s Villages thus enables girls and boys to lead self-determined, financially independent and socially integrated lives as adults.

This family pedagogic approach made SOS Children’s Villages pioneers in the care of children and gained recognition all over the world over the subsequent decades.

Helping families in need means helping before children end up on the street

When a child comes to an SOS Children’s Village, their family is already broken – a tragedy that can often be avoided. Poverty and diseases such as AIDS slowly disintegrate families.

This is why SOS Children’s Villages also provides community support for needy families. The family strengthening programme currently helps over 250,000 children and parents all over the world.

Help with school fees, a sewing machine, chickens for poultry farming – it often doesn’t take much for a family to be able to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty. Family strengthening helps families in need with short-term support and helps them to help themselves.

SOS Children's Villages will further expand this help for families in need over the next few years.

500 SOS Children’s Villages in 132 countries

Today, SOS Children’s Villages is active for children in need in all five continents with 500 SOS Children's Villages in 132 countries and over 1,560 additional social facilities such as kindergartens, schools, youth accommodation facilities, training centres, welfare centres and hospitals.

SOS is also involved in emergency relief projects in crisis situations such as civil wars, famine and natural disasters, for example, with SOS emergency relief programmes in Darfur/Sudan, Liberia, Somalia, Rwanda and countries affected by the tsunami disaster. These short-term relief efforts often evolve into SOS Children’s Villages for the children that don’t have anyone left after such catastrophes.