Save The Children

Mission and Strategy

Save the Children is the leading independent organization creating real and lasting
change for children in need in the United States and around the world. It is a member of
the International Save the Children Alliance, comprising 28 national Save the Children
organizations working in more than 110 countries to ensure the well-being of children.

The history of Save the Children is a story of positive change and people — millions of
people in thousands of communities around the globe — working together to create
opportunities for the world's children to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives. In January
1932 in a small room in New York City, a group of concerned citizens gathered to
respond to the needs of the proud people of Appalachia hard hit by the Great Depression.

The inspiration and vision for Save the Children came in part from the international
children's rights movement begun in England in 1919 by Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the
British Save the Children Fund. From this early effort in the hills and hollows of Harlan
County, Kentucky grew a self-help philosophy and practice still at work today in more
than 45 countries — providing communities with a hand up, not a handout.

This approach — working with families to define and solve the problems their children
and communities face and utilizing a broad array of strategies to ensure self-sufficiency is
the cornerstone of all Save the Children's programs. Through the decades, we have
evolved into a leading international relief and development organization. Countless
events and achievements have shaped the development of our organization and helped
change the lives of the children we serve.

Save the Children

Save the Children is a leading international organisation helping children in need around
the world. First established in the United Kingdom in 1919, separate national
organisations have been set up in more than twenty-eight countries, sharing the aim of
improving the lives of children through education, health care and economic
opportunities, as well as emergency aid in cases of natural disasters, war and conflict.

Today, twenty-eight national Save the Children organisations participate in the

International Save the Children Alliance--a global network of nonprofit organisations
working in over 120 countries around the world. Founded in Geneva in 1977, the
Alliance relocated to London in 1997.

In addition to promoting greater public awareness of the needs and rights of children
worldwide, Alliance members coordinate emergency relief efforts, helping to protect
children from the effects of disasters, both natural and manmade.
Most recently, members of the Alliance launched Rewrite the Future, a programme to
bring quality education to 8 million children living in countries affected by conflict.
Together, they are working in sixteen countries to try to ensure access to education for 3
million children and improve the quality of education for 5 million more, to make schools
safe and protect children from exploitation and abuse, and to influence national
governments and international institutions to make quality education a priority for
conflict-affected children.

History
The Save the Children Fund was founded in London, England in 1919 by Eglantyne Jebb
and her sister Dorothy Buxton. Their goal then was to create 'a powerful international
organisation, which would extend its ramifications to the remotest corner of the globe'.

Originally an offshoot of the Fight The Famine Council, a group set up to campaign
against the Allied blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary after the First World War,
the Save the Children Fund was created to raise money to send emergency aid to children
suffering as a consequences of the wartime shortages of food and supplies, which were
continuing partly as a result of the blockade. A counterpart, Rädda Barnen (which means
"Save the Children"), was founded later that year in Sweden, and together with a number
of other organisations working for children--some using the Save the Children name or a
local variant--they founded the International Save the Children Union in Geneva in 1920.
Under the banner of this organisation, emergency relief was distributed to children in
several countries.

The Fund was innovative in its use of fundraising techniques, and was the first charity in
the United Kingdom to use page-length advertisements in newspapers. The movement
was not intended to last long, and as conditions in Western Europe improved, there were
expectations that it would be wound down. However, conflict continued, and emergency
funds continued to be raised following the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and the
Russian famine of 1921.

By the middle of the 1920s the organisation began to face what would become a
continuing problem--they had developed an efficient and professional charitable
organisation, one of the best of its time, and yet the wartime crisis conditions that had
created it were coming to an end. As the emergencies receded, income began to fall
dramatically.

Their response was to change focus in two ways: the first was to concentrate on smaller,
more targeted work; it was at this time that the Fund first began to run projects in the
United Kingdom. The second was to look at the broader picture of children's rights in
general.

In 1923, Jebb wrote: "I believe we should claim certain Rights for the children and labour
for their universal recognition, so that everybody--not merely the small number of people
who are in a position to contribute to relief funds, but everybody who in any way comes
into contact with children, that is to say the vast majority of mankind--may be in a
position to help forward the movement." The result was the Declaration of the Rights of
the Child, drafted by Jebb, which was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. This
was the first important assertion of the rights of children as separate from adults, and
began the process that would lead to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
adopted by the United Nations in 1989 and now ratified by nearly all countries
worldwide.

The Declaration became, in effect, the mission statement of the Save the Children
movement. It sustained the organisation after Jebb's death in 1929 and on into the lean
years of the 1930s, when income shrank to a trickle. Indeed, inspired by the document's
universal commitment, Save the Children began to work beyond Europe, promoting an
international conference on conditions for children in Africa in 1931, and opening a
nursery school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1936. Despite this, the general direction of
the organisation's work was in response to the prevailing economic and political climate.
In 1936, it published Unemployment and the Child, a study of the effects of the Great
Depression on children. In the same year, the school just opened in Ethiopia had to shut
suddenly when the country was invaded by Italy.

As the 1930s drew to an end, the increasing international tension was to affect the
organisation's work even more. Assistance was given to Basque child refugees from the
Spanish Civil War and Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. The growing likelihood of
an international conflict led to an attempt to promote a convention on the treatment of
children in wartime. Such optimistic ideas were quickly swept aside by the start of the
Second World War.

In wartime, aid was concentrated mainly in the United Kingdom. From early on,
however, planning began for dealing with the anticipated need for postwar relief work.
When the war ended, Save the Children staff were among the first into the liberated areas,
working with refugee children and displaced persons in former occupied Europe,
including survivors of concentration camps. At the same time, work in the United
Kingdom focused on improving conditions for children growing up in cities devastated
by bombing and facing huge disruptions in family life.

The 1950s saw a continuation of this type of crisis-driven work, with additional demands
for help following the Korean War and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, but also the
opening of new work in Africa, Asia and the Middle East in response to the decline in
Britain's colonial empire.

Like other aid agencies, Save the Children was active in the major disasters of the era--
especially the Vietnam War and the Biafra secession in Nigeria. The latter brought
shocking images of child starvation onto the television screens of the West for the first
time in a major way. The sort of mass-marketing campaigns first used by Save the
Children in the 1920s were repeated, with great success in fundraising, although
questions would later be asked as to the long-term effects of such images on the popular
consciousness.

Disasters in Ethiopia, Sudan, and many other world hotspots, led to appeals which
brought public donations on a huge scale, and a consequent expansion of the
organisation's work. However, the children's rights-based approach originated by
Eglantyne Jebb continues to be an important factor, with, for example, a major campaign
in the late 1990s against the use of child soldiers.

On May 1, 2008, Pascal Marlinge, a French employee was shot dead by gunmen as he
was travelling with a convoy in eastern Chad near the Sudanese border.[1]

Save the Children on May, 2008, stated that UN peacekeepers and aid workers in Ivory
Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, were molesting children as young as six. Most victims
suffered sexual exploitation and abuse in silence, resulting in unreported and unpunished
crimes.
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