Our work
Our home works to protect any child living on the streets, rescuing them from modern day slavery, sexual exploitation, physical abuse, abandonment or in danger.
Almost always with nowhere to go, they are completely alone, homeless and extremely vulnerable and stressed out, so we rescue them.
Firstly, we give them a safe, happy and caring place to stay and call home for a while, and they immediately become part of the family. Then we figure out what the problem was and start work to solve it. They quickly return to school, become part of society again, and ultimately we aim to reunite them with their families. By the time they move on, we will have transformed their lives and their futures for the better.
We are the only organisation locally to have an open door policy – any child that needs help can find a caring place to call home for a while, and we are almost completely funded by private individuals deciding to help us. Almost 3,000 children have now lived in our home.
We don’t just run a children’s home though
We are politically active to strengthen child protection policies in Sierra Leone and have addressed 15 countries at parliament level on this matter. We are leading a group of organisations on this to improve children’s lives. We are always running community intervention projects promoting children’s welfare.
If there is a public emergency, our team will seek out the children affected and help, examples of this are following a huge fire, flooding and landslide that affected entire communities.
The biggest of all responses was when Ebola hit.
Our impact is considerable for a small team, because we do not work in isolation We are involved with major organisations and people daily, the Police and local social services that refer many of our children to us. But it is not at all unusual to be in meetings with Government Ministers, UNICEF, UNDP, Catholic Church of Sierra Leone, even the President has been involved!
Working freely with others gives confidence to work in partnership with other charities too. We are currently working closely with Vibrant Villages on major projects to improve community self- reliance.
Careful with Money
With no salaries in the UK (because we are all volunteers) our supporters know that around 98% of their financial support does go directly to helping the children. Our team in Sierra Leone are equally passionate and accept the local pay rate for the jobs they do (that’s not very much).
We are not funded by government or any major campaign.
We spend a fraction of the national average on administration and we can keep a child in care for just 2% of doing the same thing in the UK. We are incredibly careful when spending donor’s money.
However, we admit to being terrible at social media and publicising our story and you have probably never heard of us... ...we never have the time! For the last twenty odd years we have been flat out helping the children, and that’s always been the centre of our attention.
But if you want to join us to help even more children, your support WILL actually change a real child’s or children’s lives. There are plenty of children out there that we could rescue today.
Stories from children we have helped
Listen to these children telling us in a few sentences how the St George Foundation helped them.
