Investing In Community
The Overall aim of SOS Community Centres is to help families, in particular women and children, living in communities neighbouring the SOS Children's Villages to gradually escape from poverty, and to help young people to become self-reliant.
SOS Children's Villages recognises that it is best for a child to grow up in its own, biological family provided that the child's mental or physical health is not at risk. Therefore, SOS Social Centres aim to provide support to parents struggling to cope with life, so that children can continue to grow up within the protective world of their own families.
Helping Give Individuals Opportunity
An important focus at SOS Community Centres located in Africa is the provision of vocational training for mums who have to help support their families. Programmes on offer are tailored to meet the needs of the local market and range from literacy classes to dressmaking, bakery, or keeping animals. The idea is to improve their chances of finding work and generating a regular income to enable them to better support themselves and their children. In many places, women have gone on to set up their own businesses with the help of start-up loans.
Helping Families Prosper
Day care centres or nurseries provide pre-school education for the children of working single parents, impoverished or dysfunctional families. Some community centres also include transit homes for small children who are unable to live at home with their parents and are in need of temporary accommodation. Advice on medical, social and employment matters, hygiene, nutrition and child care is also available. Many centres also offer counselling facilities and libraries, as well as medical care in health centres or clinics.
SOS Social Centres are involved in running a number of projects, which help improve both individually as well as collectively the economic and vocational perspectives within local communities. At the same time, the clientele are expected to make an active contribution to the programmes so as to avoid long-term dependency. Wherever they are based, the SOS Social Centres also help the SOS Children's Villages to achieve a high level of integration within the local communities and to develop into open houses of mutual support.
The SOS Children's Villages Ethos is about giving people and communities the means to develop themselves.
So far SOS Children's Villages has set up over fifty medical centres outside of Europe in order to help people who have little or no access to medical facilities. The medical facilities run by SOS Children's Villages work to meet the basic medical needs of the people in their surrounding areas and, in exceptional cases, such as the SOS Emergency Aid Clinic in Mogadishu, focus on national requirements.
The aim of the SOS Medical Centres, which are attached to SOS Children's Villages, is to improve the standards of public health in the local communities. to play a preventive role through information and vaccination programmes, reduce infant mortality rates, stabilize and feed up undernourished children and to provide first aid in the case of accidents.
The clinics are open seven days a week and normally offer out-patient treatment and preventive medicine (vaccinations, courses on hygiene, prophylactics, nutrition, first aid etc). Many clinics also have their own laboratory, a small ward and a pharmacy. In addition SOS Children's Villages builds small dental clinics and medical facilities for handicapped children and youngsters.
One of the biggest challenges of the past few years and for the future has been and will be the dramatic increase in HIV/AIDS. The rate of HIV infections has taken on such proportions that the social basis, the economic strength and the inner structures of whole communities have been weakened. An example of SOS Children's Villages commitment to to fighting HIV/AIDS are the 'Mother-and-Child Clinics'. These are especially important due to the high HIV Mother-To-Child-Transmission ratio in Africa. These clinics offer ante- and post-natal care as well as childbirth facilities, plus the necessary vaccinations for babies.
The SOS Medical Centres must also develop new concepts and strategies in order to be able to react to the changing demands: An increasing number of information campaigns about the risk of infection and against discrimination against AIDS infected people are being carried out in medical centres, especially in the African countries. Advice and support is being offered to the relatives of people with HIV as well as medical treatment for those infected.