About Us
Background and Staff
Action for Street Kids was established in 2000 by a two concerned individuals with a background of working in the charity sector, in particular of running projects to assist street and other vulnerable children in developing countries.
Action for Street Kids currently has six trustees who bring with them a wealth of professional experience, from child protection to financial management, administration, university lecturing and fundraising.
All of our trustees dedicate their time, energy and expertise to the charity on a voluntary basis. They are involved not only with the day to day management of the charity here in the UK, with issues of governance and financial planning, but also take an active role in the monitoring of our projects overseas: This is important as it ensures that the generous donations which you the public make to our charity are being used as efficiently as possible and are successfully reaching out to those children who are most in need.
Kids now in shelters set up by donations via ASK
Action for Street Kids currently employs only two staff members (an Administrator and a Fundraising Officer) on a part-time basis. We have no physical office premises – both staff members work from home – which helps to keep the charity’s running costs to a minimum and ensures that more of our precious funds can be used to help vulnerable children and young people.
Action for Street Kids is non-political, non-religious charity: all of our projects aim to help those children who are most in need irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity or nationality.
Action for Street Kids is registered with the Charity Commission of England and Wales (charity number 1082810).
Long term support to local partners
The ethos of our work is to provide long term core support to all of our partner projects. Ensuring that projects have the necessary resources to keep going is the most important thing we can do for them. It means that children are fed, have a bed to sleep in, clean clothes, medical care, education and hope for the future. It enables projects to focus on caring for the children, rather than worrying about where resources will come from. It also means projects do not have to face the constant frustration and sadness of reducing services, laying off staff, and worst of all, closing down and seeing children end up back on the streets. Helping to train and build the capacity of local staff. Action for Street Kids works with local partners who all employ their own local staff. We believe that local organisations are the best placed to identify and to respond effectively to the needs of children in their area.
Our vital funding assists not only the project beneficiaries (i.e. the children), but also provides training and mentoring for the local staff who work tirelessly to assist them, often going out into the streets to make contact with the children and risking their lives in the process. Our dedicated project staff risk attack and threats as they take on drug and street gangs (our Outreach Worker in South Africa), are shot at by pimps (our Outreach Worker in Thailand) , and deal with the children who are high on glue or other drugs. In being willing to go out onto the streets and take these risks however, children's lives are saved and children are given hope.
Helping children to stay with their families
We believe that a child’s place is at home with his family in his own community. However, we recognise that often the reason a child is in the streets is because of problems at home. That is why many of our partner projects assist not just the street child in isolation, but also the parents or relatives of street children, in order to bring about an overall improvement in the family’s socio-economic or personal circumstances. Our partners assist relatives of street children with skills training and income generating support, counselling, and vital mediation and reconciliation services, helping to reunite children and parents who have become separated due to conflict or family rifts.
Where a child cannot return home to parents or relatives due to severe abuse or lack of care and there is no member of the community willing or able to look after him / her, we will support children in long term care homes.
We will fund our partner projects for as long as there are children on the streets who need our help. We hope also that the level of support we are able to give will increase over time.
