MANILA, Philippines - After nearly half a century of providing long-term family care and education to children in need, SOS Children’s Villages Philippines opens its eighth Children’s Village in Mariveles, Bataan. The 12 new family houses of SOS Children’s Village Bataan now serve as loving homes to 96 orphaned and abandoned children.
Until 2016, SOS Children’s Villages Philippines plans to establish four more Children’s Villages, raise 20,000 friends to support its programs, increase its workforce to 590 people, and enable 26,800 Filipino children to grow in loving families, either within the SOS families or through their own biological families benefiting from family strengthening programs.
“For many years, our program structure was defined from a facility-based perspective – that we are a place providing love and support to children in need. Building on that foundation, we are now more aggressively responding to children who are at risk of losing parental care by expanding our program to their own biological families,” said Bienvenido Delgado, national director of SOS Children’s Villages Philippines.
A total of 3,927 children currently benefit from these family strengthening programs.