Mrs Lily Safra donates another €1m to Hope and Homes for Children
Howard Lake | 10 July 2015 | News
Mrs. Lily Safra has donated €1 million to Hope and Homes for Children to help the charity work with the Romanian government to close the country’s remaining 184 orphanages within the next five years.
Mrs. Safra, a Patron of Hope and Homes for Children, is its largest individual donor. She has helped fund the work in Romania since 2004, making donations totaling €3.4 million before she made her latest gift.
Hope and Homes for Children has helped to reduce the number of children in state-run orphanages from over 100,000 in the 1990s to only 8,721 today. Mrs Safra’s donation will help it enable nearly 9,000 children to return to their birth families, to be adopted into loving homes, placed with foster parents or supported to live independently. It will also help fund Small Family Homes for children who cannot be reunited with families, as well as expand support services to prevent child abandonment.
Hope and Hopes for Children is also working to change outdated attitudes to childcare policy and practices. With support from Mrs. Safra and other donors, the organisation helps local governments put in place the alternative care systems that prevent children from entering institutions in the first place, training hundreds of childcare professionals around the country each year.
Mrs Lily Safra has now donated a total of €4.4 million to Hope and Homes for Children
Mrs. Safra said:
“For more than ten years, I have been so proud to support Hope and Homes for Children in saving thousands of children, and I have experienced such joy in seeing their smiles as they experience care and love for the first time in their lives. It will be such a wonderful moment when, in five years’ time, we can mark an end to the era of large-scale state orphanages in Romania.”
Her support and the work it has achieved has helped to leverage support from many not-for-profit organisations and policy makers including the EU.
Mrs. Lily Safra worked with her husband, the late Edmond J. Safra, to develop the work of the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation. Since 1999 she has chaired this Foundation and supports projects related to education, science and medicine, religion, culture, and humanitarian relief in over 40 countries.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.