Pledge to make a difference, together.
WereldOuders focuses on the empowerment and personal development of vulnerable children and families in Latin America and the Caribbean. With us, they receive attention and the support that suits them. WereldOuders has a unique approach, based on four pillars: a safe home, health, education and independence.
By providing a social safety net while building the children's self-confidence, they regain a future perspective, an opportunity to realize their dreams. WereldOuders has projects in nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. These are Bolivia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru.
A home is the most important safe base for a child. When a home situation is scarred by poverty, addiction, violence or the death of one of the parents, the secure base falls away. WereldOuders and partner organization NPH are committed to creating or restoring a safe home base for children and youth in Latin America.
Our vision of "a safe home" has changed significantly over the past years. NPH was founded in Mexico in 1954 with the opening of a children's home for children who had nowhere else to go. The organization continued to expand to include children's homes in the other eight countries. More than 19,000 children found shelter in an NPH home. These homes were called "family homes" by the organization. NPH placed great importance on creating a warm, loving family atmosphere in the homes.
No matter how well this worked out, a family home can never replace a real family. With today's knowledge, arising from empirical evidence and in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, we recognize the unintended harmful effect that institutionalization has on children and youth. Children and youth become alienated from their families and communities of origin. Stigmas attached to growing up in a children's home lead to (young) adults struggling to find their place in society.
Having no family to fall back on makes it difficult to hold your own in society as an "uprooted" adult. 'Our' children can always come to NPH even later in life, but that is an exception in the world of children's homes. Uprootedness in general is a major problem: this group has difficulty raising their own children and keeping them from ending up in crime or on the streets.
International child welfare organizations are therefore increasingly focusing on de-institutionalization. NPH, too, is going through this transition. We can and want to do more to really change the situation of families and children. We have to change course. We have therefore started to focus more and more on supporting vulnerable families and communities to prevent families from falling apart. This is not entirely new: since its founding, NPH has supported more than 80,000 children who did not live in an NPH family home.
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