Lotus Child Caring for the Street Children of India
Our Current Projects
Lotus Child is supports a number of separate and distinct programmes with different partners in India. With further funding, we hope to expand the number of projects we support and increase the number of children we rescue from hardship, abuse and premature death.
Buds to Blossoms Project
Two separate groups of volunteers have traveled with Lotus Child to India in 2011 and 2013 to build resource centres and schools. In 2011 our group built a rural village south of Kolkata. In 2013 we worked with a community on the outskirts of Kolkata. As well as funding the building of this centre, the ongoing running costs for the school, teachers, training programmes, adult education, income generation programmes and health camps and training are funded by monies raised by the volunteers. This is a Project about Prevention, Partnership, Community Education & Empowerment and Sustainability. Please click here for more information.
Kasba Little Girls Home, Kolkata
Lotus Child provides running costs for a home for over 60 little girls who have been rescued from the streets of Kolkata, from sexual predators, from disease, from destitution and abandonment. In this home, run and co-funded by the Hope Foundation Kolkata, these little girls receive love, care, education, nutrition and a secure and protected environment in which to blossom. Our charity has provide over €200,000 over the past four years for the costs of running this house providing for all the little girls who call it home.
Child Sponsorship Programme, Darjeeling
North of Kolkata, in Darjeeling, Cork nurse, Edith Wilkins has been working tirelessly with Indian street children for more than 25 years. The Edith Wilkins Foundation runs a number of projects including a home, night shelter and drop in centres for young boys and girls, from neo-natal up to 16 years of age. Edith and her team rescue and educate, nurture and secure new lives for these abandoned little children giving them a life that would otherwise be lost to premature death or disease. Many of these children are victims of physical or sexual abuse or condemned from birth through trafficking in the sex trade until AIDs or other diseases claim their lives, often before they reach the age of 12. No child is ever turned away but welcomed and loved. Through our child sponsorship programme we provide funding for the care and education of nearly 50 children every year in Darjeeling.
Education Programme, Kolkata
While she has no biological children of her own, Loreto Nun, Sister Cyril is mother to thousands of children in India and has spent the past 50 years battling the education system in Kolkata and its treatment of street children. Together with the staff at Loreto School, Sealdah their mission is to educate children and give them a sense of their own worth and through the light of education, give meaning to the lives of these children. The cost to each child is an undertaking by that child to re-educate another child so that the “ripple effect” will ensure that every child in India will have the opportunity to read and write and change their world and how the rest of the world sees them. Lotus Child supports her life-changing work, sponsoring the education of children and providing funding for teacher training and salaries
