Keep an At-Risk Child Alive

We Help Vulnerable Communities Build Their Own Healthcare Capacity

Through our more than 50 years of working with some of the world’s most vulnerable children and their families, we’ve come to understand a couple of truths. First, that those living in extreme poverty will always need immediate help during a healthcare crisis like the Covid pandemic. And second, that helping at-risk communities build their own healthcare capacity is the best way to help them move towards self-reliance.

To us, building capacity is about a couple of key areas. Healthcare infrastructure and skilled healthcare professionals. Without hospitals or health clinics, and trained doctors in or near a community, children and mothers are especially at risk of dying — mothers during childbirth.

So we help the communities we serve build healthcare capacity by:

• Funding infrastructure-building projects
• Providing medical materials and equipment to local clinics and hospitals
• Organizing visits by teams of healthcare professionals to train their local equivalents

Our Health & Well-Being Programs

Ethiopia

Highly skilled U.S. healthcare professionals train local doctors to do complicated OB/GYN surgeries, C-sections and deliveries, and Health Support Workers in preventative healthcare. We funded and built the Leku Hospital in the South, and the Atsede-Mariam Health Clinic in the north. We also provide medical supplies to local clinics and hospitals in areas where we run Family Preservation programs.

We recently started funding the operation of One-Stop Centers where traumatized women and girls can receive the medical and counseling support they need to deal with Gender-Based Violence. We started offering this essential service in the northern Tigray region where the recent civil war left unimaginable trauma in its wake. We are now expanding this work to the south.

Guatemala

We funded and built the Las Minas Community Center and Medical Clinic. Children and their families are able to get regular medical and dental check-ups, hearing and eye tests. This year, we will send skilled medical teams from Guatemala City and abroad to train and upskill local medical professionals.

Burundi

Throughout 2025, we’ve been funding the completion of a Medical Clinic in the Makebuko suburb of Gitega. It will shortly be ready to open its doors to this community of 200,000, most of whom have never been seen by a healthcare professional in their lives. Initially focusing on maternal and child healthcare, we expect this clinic to lower their death rates significantly. And reducing maternal death rates is the key to reducing the number of orphaned or abandoned infants being relinquished to orphanages by heartbroken fathers unable to feed them.