Lumos Foundation USA was launched in 2015 to ensure that children around the world are raised in families, not orphanages.
Lumos USA worked with policy-makers, philanthropists, faith leaders, likeminded non-profit organizations, and concerned individuals to promote affordable, realistic, family-based alternatives to child institutionalization. We worked creatively with our partners to address the root causes of child institutionalisation – such as poverty and trafficking – to realise a world in which every child is raised in a loving family.
Lumos USA worked with the US government on foreign policy related to child institutionalization and all related factors: poverty reduction, education, and health care are just a few. We encouraged the US government to be a bold and powerful advocate for family-based care for children worldwide. The US government itself did away with the orphanage model of child care some sixty years ago.
We worked with anti-trafficking agencies and organizations to highlight the links between orphanages and modern slavery, and to ensure that anti-trafficking assessments and policies included orphanage trafficking.
Lumos USA also worked behind the scenes with multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations and international financial institutions, to encourage smart development in countries that perpetuate the orphanage system.
Lumos USA raised money to support projects overseas, where we are developing proof of concept – that a country’s system of child care CAN transition from one based on an institutional model (orphanages) to one based on family care.
Lumos’ demonstration projects addressed the root causes of institutionalization. A key driver into institutions is poverty, and we thus worked with governments and families to ensure that a lack of money is not a reason for a parent to feel forced to give up a child. Lumos invested in vocational training for families and worked with governments on providing free and inclusive education and health care to ensure that families had the support they need to raise their children.
Philanthropists are an extremely powerful force for global social change. Private donors in the United States alone gave away $410 billion in 2017.
Lumos traced $100 million in private, mostly low-dollar, donations going to Haitian orphanages, of which 90% came from the United States. Lumos USA works in partnership with philanthropists to share better alternatives to child institutionalization and to encourage investments in family-based care.
In 2018, news broke of the forced separation of more than 2,600 migrant children from their parents at the US/Mexico border. The subsequent placement of many of these children in detention centers compounded the trauma experienced in their home countries, on the way to the border and during separation.
Lumos USA works with partner organizations in the US and Guatemala to provide social and medical support to children and their families, deliver trauma services, and safely reunify children with their families.
