Helping Children Worldwide
A story of radical faith and radical courage.
A mission born out of war.
A ministry guided by grace.
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You may have heard some of the horror of this story from "Blood Diamonds" - but every dark cloud is lined with silver.
Helping Children Worldwide's heart and soul has a home. Anyone who has spent a significant portion of the last 25 years with us, knows our heart resides at the Child Reintegration Centre in Bo, Sierra Leone, West Africa. It is where our mission was born and where we return every opportunity we can to Africa to work in collaboration with the staff and leadership there, as well as bringing them here, and spending hours each week in meetings together, planning and implementing our plans. After ten years of brutal civil war destroyed families and communities in Sierra Leone, thousands of children were separated from their parents, some living in the streets and others hiding in the bush, alone and struggling to survive. In the fall of 1999, Reverend John K. Yambasu was working as a children’s ministry missionary for the United Methodist Church in his own country of Sierra Leone. He traveled to the US with a fervent hope of finding help for children who were orphaned or separated from their families. He reached out to his friend, Rev. Tom Berlin, who invited him to speak to his congregation in the greater D.C. area about dedicating a special Christmas Eve offering to help children they would most likely never meet. Children who were suffering far away in the city of Bo, Sierra Leone, West Africa. After Rev. Yambasu described his vision of a feeding program for children begging in the streets and sleeping under market tables in the City of Bo, to the congregation of Floris United Methodist Church in Northern Virginia, he received such an outpouring of generous support that he and Rev. Berlin realized God had bigger plans, and they courageously and faithfully answered the call to do more. With Floris’ ongoing annual support, the street feeding program was transformed into a residential home for children. Children were rescued from the streets and the first forty children came to live at the Child Rescue Centre, finding a safe place to lay their heads at night, where they would be fed, clothed and educated. And he took a child and put him in the midst of them, and taking him in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.” Mark 9:36-37 |
We are two hearts beating as one, two hands with one heart, reaching across the ocean for the love of God's children.
Bishop John K. Yambasu, Child Reintegration Centre Co-Founder |
Child Rescue to Child Reintegration
From children in need of rescue to families in need of support.
The CRC has been leading the way since July 4, 2000.
The war finally came to an end, but the effect of horrendous acts of violence and destruction in the name of political gain remain, even to this day.
In a part of the world where resources are scare and poverty endemic, war had made everything far, far worse. War destroyed what gains had been made over the past fifty years. Families had lost homes, children had lost parents. Conflict had rendered communities devastated and isolated, the railway tracks had been ripped up, hospitals, churches, mosques and schools destroyed. The already fragile education, health and social welfare systems were shattered. The need for assistance was extreme, and the government of Sierra Leone was not able to provide the help that was needed. Mission teams from Floris dispatched to Sierra Leone to help. The more trips they took to Bo, the more they felt called to help. They learned that the people of Sierra Leone fell among the highest poverty rates, lowest adult literacy rates, highest infant death rates, highest under 5 deaths, and highest maternal mortality rates in the world. They felt blessed by God, and called by their faith to act. They knew, the greater their generosity, the more the Child Rescue Centre could do for the impoverished children of Bo. But this was only one congregation, and as the work of the Child Rescue Centre expanded, so did the need for support. In 2003, Floris reached out to other churches, asking them to come together to support the orphanage in Sierra Leone. At the same time, they established a nonprofit organization, Helping Children Worldwide, to capture the mission and pastoral leadership’s vision to provide financial and strategic support to the Child Rescue Centre and help children in circumstances like the children they had encountered in Bo.
In a part of the world where resources are scare and poverty endemic, war had made everything far, far worse. War destroyed what gains had been made over the past fifty years. Families had lost homes, children had lost parents. Conflict had rendered communities devastated and isolated, the railway tracks had been ripped up, hospitals, churches, mosques and schools destroyed. The already fragile education, health and social welfare systems were shattered. The need for assistance was extreme, and the government of Sierra Leone was not able to provide the help that was needed. Mission teams from Floris dispatched to Sierra Leone to help. The more trips they took to Bo, the more they felt called to help. They learned that the people of Sierra Leone fell among the highest poverty rates, lowest adult literacy rates, highest infant death rates, highest under 5 deaths, and highest maternal mortality rates in the world. They felt blessed by God, and called by their faith to act. They knew, the greater their generosity, the more the Child Rescue Centre could do for the impoverished children of Bo. But this was only one congregation, and as the work of the Child Rescue Centre expanded, so did the need for support. In 2003, Floris reached out to other churches, asking them to come together to support the orphanage in Sierra Leone. At the same time, they established a nonprofit organization, Helping Children Worldwide, to capture the mission and pastoral leadership’s vision to provide financial and strategic support to the Child Rescue Centre and help children in circumstances like the children they had encountered in Bo.
From the CRC Partnership, an unincorporated church mission association to help orphans in Sierra Leone, to Helping Children Worldwide, a 501(c)3 Nonprofit Corporation with a global mission.
The board of the new nonprofit begin immediately building a health facility to serve children in the impoverished community in Sierra Leone, recognizing that health services is an upstream strategy to prevent children from becoming orphans, particularly maternal/infant prenatal and delivery services.
The vision for Helping Children Worldwide was reflected in its aspirational name, and meant finding ways to help "Every Child, Everywhere, in Every Way We Can" and the fledgling nonprofit immediately began seeking other, better ways they could serve more children beyond the collaborations in Africa, including creating a local coalition to serve impoverished children in the U.S. (That charity continues to this date, but was “spun off” and is no longer affiliated with Helping Children Worldwide.)
Today, the organization remains faith-based and is still connected to church communities from Virginia, Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, and Kansas support the work of Helping Children Worldwide. some in full partnership, and they join us in passionately advocating for children in Sierra Leone, and for children and families affected by extreme poverty in many communities and many ways all across the globe.
To learn more about the transformations in our alliance with the CRC in 25 years, including how it became a leader in the care reform movement, click the Read More button below.
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:9
The vision for Helping Children Worldwide was reflected in its aspirational name, and meant finding ways to help "Every Child, Everywhere, in Every Way We Can" and the fledgling nonprofit immediately began seeking other, better ways they could serve more children beyond the collaborations in Africa, including creating a local coalition to serve impoverished children in the U.S. (That charity continues to this date, but was “spun off” and is no longer affiliated with Helping Children Worldwide.)
Today, the organization remains faith-based and is still connected to church communities from Virginia, Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, and Kansas support the work of Helping Children Worldwide. some in full partnership, and they join us in passionately advocating for children in Sierra Leone, and for children and families affected by extreme poverty in many communities and many ways all across the globe.
To learn more about the transformations in our alliance with the CRC in 25 years, including how it became a leader in the care reform movement, click the Read More button below.
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:9
Upstream solutions to prevent orphanhood and instill child resiliency.
The upstream solutions of health systems strengthening and economic empowerment have proven to be excellent vehicles for expanded collaborations and coalition building that yields greater impacts for every dollar we raise and spend. To read more about the history of those collaborations, click the Read More button below.
Mercy Hospital, Together for Global Health and Community Economic Empowerment
Our Future Past - A New Approach to the Relationships that Inform Our Work.
At some point in time, HCW accepted there was a better way to do orphan mission than building orphanages and sending children to live in them. We learned that the answer to orphanhood was a family, not a building, that the children we had been helping had parents and families that would love to raise and nurture them, and we changed our language to recognize what we thought was an orphan crisis was actually a family separation crisis all along. At that same point in time, we recognized there was also a better way to conduct joint mission collaborations, and we began to work to balance responsibility appropriately, and to share power equally with our friends operating in Sierra Leone. We formalized these changes in stages, moving more and more into balance in our approach to one another.
This is the journey we are on now, and unsurprisingly, we find that we are again on the cusp of change, and leading where we thought we had fallen behind. By the time we have history to share on our progress, hopefully, we will no longer be so far ahead of the curve, and creating one of the few examples in our sector of what it means to operate under standards we think everyone engaged in cross-cultural alliances should want to adopt. We know intuitively that such a change is essential for the adoption of sustainable, permanent solutions to the big problems we are all trying to address.
This is why we changed our language in 2024 with respect to our relationship with the leadership of the institutions we support in Sierra Leone, defining that as an alliance, rather than a partnership. Just as assumed solutions for family separation are different than those adopted for orphans, we expect the way we approach a global alliance may be more sustainable than the way we approach a partnership between organizations operating under the influence of Global South and Global North cultures. it may seem like a form over substance difference as we adjust to the new terms, but we believe it will be viewed as an important distinction in the future. Only history will confirm or disprove that theory.
This is the journey we are on now, and unsurprisingly, we find that we are again on the cusp of change, and leading where we thought we had fallen behind. By the time we have history to share on our progress, hopefully, we will no longer be so far ahead of the curve, and creating one of the few examples in our sector of what it means to operate under standards we think everyone engaged in cross-cultural alliances should want to adopt. We know intuitively that such a change is essential for the adoption of sustainable, permanent solutions to the big problems we are all trying to address.
This is why we changed our language in 2024 with respect to our relationship with the leadership of the institutions we support in Sierra Leone, defining that as an alliance, rather than a partnership. Just as assumed solutions for family separation are different than those adopted for orphans, we expect the way we approach a global alliance may be more sustainable than the way we approach a partnership between organizations operating under the influence of Global South and Global North cultures. it may seem like a form over substance difference as we adjust to the new terms, but we believe it will be viewed as an important distinction in the future. Only history will confirm or disprove that theory.
