Our Mission

Our mission is simple: to provide loving support for orphans, fostering a greater capacity for physical, spiritual, and emotional healing and growth, and deploying the local church to do the same.  

While our target beneficiaries are orphan children, we do not adhere to a rigid definition, and instead consider an orphan child to be any child that lacks one or both parents, has been abandoned, and or lacks a primary caregiver. Stated more clearly: any child who lacks the care, provision, and safety that can be found in family.

Our initiatives that support children in need are eligible based on the lack of direct-parental care. Primary determination is left to our field partners, with a clearly stated priority to serve orphan children. Orphanhood is a single tangible indicator of a child’s vulnerability not a definition of who they are. However, many individual and household circumstances expose children who are not orphans to economic, social, and health risks that may require intervention.

An operational term “orphans and vulnerable children” (OVC) has been adopted to aid program targeting for many NGO’s. This term includes not only children who are orphaned following a parental death, but also children considered vulnerable to shocks that jeopardize their health and overall well-being. This includes the chronic illness of a parent and other detrimental household factors.

You will see the term ‘vulnerable’ and ‘orphaned’ used interchangeably by Global Orphan Relief, but an overwhelming majority of the children we serve through our initiatives are orphaned children missing one or both parents.

In addition to vulnerable children, many widows are also blessed through our initiatives. In fact, the care we provide, at whatever level, has a ripple effect through the entire community as we demonstrate God’s love for His children.