OUR STORY
We help hundreds and thousands of the world’s most vulnerable children. It starts with one.
Since 2001, One to One Children’s Fund has been pioneering grassroots models that have been replicated, scaled up and adopted by governments when they have proven successful. This has allowed us to directly and indirectly benefit hundreds and thousands of the world’s most vulnerable children.
OUR VISion
A world where every child has access to care and education to enable them to realise their potential, lead a fulfilling life and feel valued.
Our Mission
Our mission is to improve the well-being and life chances of children, young people and families affected by dislocation, poverty and chronic illness, such as HIV. We seek to address core gaps in physical and mental healthcare by developing innovative peer leadership models in neglected and under-served communities, and using local knowledge to build the capacity of those best placed to respond.
We aim to be a consistent beacon of good practice in our charitable mission and to scale up our work where appropriate so it is ultimately sustainable by governments or local NGOs.
Jenna Coleman and One to One Children's Fund
“A charity driven by deep human values making changes for defenceless young people and children in communities where it is very difficult for governments and other representative organisations to do so.”
History
One to One Children’s Fund was founded in the aftermath of the war in Kosovo in 2000. We provided post-trauma counselling to some of the many children who desperately needed support to process the horror and brutality they had experienced. At the time, there was only one trained child psychotherapist in Kosovo. We immediately trained 14 more. The project provided counselling to over 2,500 children affected by the war, and led to child psychotherapy becoming a recognised profession in Kosovo, benefiting thousands more children.
We have taken our expertise working with children traumatised by violence to the Middle East, where we work with children from Palestinian and Israeli communities. Our schools-based intervention addressed children’s mental health. Initially reaching 2,500 children, the programme was so successful the Municipality of Acre rolled it out across the entire city. Passing our projects over to governments and other agencies is integral to the One to One Children’s Fund model.
Some of our biggest successes have been in the fight against AIDS
In South Africa in 2002, President Mbeki’s government was still denying AIDS was caused by HIV and was refusing to provide lifesaving treatment. It is estimated that 330,000 people died because of government inaction. Our response was to launch a pilot programme that put 250 children in the Western Cape on antiretroviral therapy. These children survived and began to thrive, helping change government policy. South Africa now has the largest antiretroviral treatment roll-out programme in the world – hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved.
The GSH programme began hosting health provider teams from across South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, becoming an important learning ground for others who wanted to initiate paediatric treatment programmes. Seeing this peer learning in action inspired the birth of PATA, co-founded and initially funded by One to One Children’s Fund as a knowledge sharing, action network of paediatric HIV health provider teams. Today the PATA network extends to more than 450 clinics with 200,000 children on ART in 26 countries across sub-Saharan Africa. One to One Children’s Fund Chair, David Altschuler, chaired the board of directors of PATA for its first 13 years.
In 2006 we started to develop the Expert Patient Programme in partnership with Pata. Through it people living with HIV could help clinical staff with their duties and provide emotional support to the people they were treating, or follow up with people who had stopped taking drugs.
Using people living with HIV as community health workers was revolutionary at the time (in 2013 the project was listed as one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Top 100 Innovations). Now their role is accepted world-wide.
We continue to develop and test new models to reach vulnerable children, and to harness the resources and creativity of local communities and build the capacity of those best placed to respond to the needs of children; teachers, counsellors, community health workers and local organisations.