Education, support and a safe place to stay, for the children who need it most.
Status: incomplete. The need is clear. The model is proposed. The money is unsolved.
1 child in a children’s home
Up to 80 more at home with relatives, uncounted
01Who we mean
When you think of an orphanage, what comes to mind?
Think about it. No, really think about it.
That’s what we are changing. Every aspect of what just came into your mind.
Starting with this: the picture in your head is the smallest part of the problem. The children who need help most are rarely in an orphanage. They are at home, in a home that cannot hold them.
Not enough money
A household that cannot feed, clothe or school the child it has.
Not enough adults
One overstretched carer, often a grandparent, raising children alone.
A hostile or dangerous home
Violence, neglect or exploitation, inside the house or at its door.
Neither parent
Migrated, separated, gone. Rarely dead. The only condition counted region-wide.
Only the last of these has been counted across the region, so it is the one we can show.
74–93%
of children living with neither parent have both parents alive. Only 0.1 to 1 per cent of all children have lost both.
1 in 5
children aged 15 to 17 in Honduras and the Dominican Republic live with neither parent, the years when leaving school for work pulls hardest.
Their parents migrated for work, separated, or could not cope. Relatives took the children in, grandparents first, then aunts and uncles, then older siblings.
No court placed them. Nobody pays for them. No system counts them, because they are neither orphans nor “in care”.
Children living with neither parent, by country
El Salvador Tested here
9.9%
So most of the children we mean already have a home. What they do not have is everything around it, and sometimes, a home that is safe.
Corrected Sep 2026. Earlier versions opened with “130 million orphans”, UNICEF’s count of children who have lost at least one parent.
Not counted. Conditions 1–3 have no regional figure yet. About 4 in 10 children live in poverty (CEPAL). Dangerous homes: no figure.
02What they are missing
Having a home isn’t always the problem. Sometimes it’s whether there’s enough support.
School
In rural Mexico, a migrant parent cut boys’ chances of finishing junior high by 22% and high school by 13% (15% for girls). In Bolivia, carers could not help with schoolwork and had no support from local authorities.
Work
In El Salvador, boys aged 13 to 17 with a migrant parent are 12% more likely to be working.
Emotional
In Venezuela, fewer than 4% of children left behind get any psychosocial support. Of those who did, 45% reported anger, abandonment and frustration.
Legal limbo
About 60% of Venezuelan children left with relatives had no document giving their carer guardianship. Without it, a carer cannot always enrol a child, consent to treatment or travel with them.
The carers
The relatives who take them in are often older. 39% of people aged 65 to 69 in the region get no contributory pension.
Safety
Sometimes the home itself is the danger. We have no regional figure for this yet, and it is the need that makes a safe harbour non-negotiable.
03What an Awesomage is · proposed
Well, let’s take an orphanage and make it as Awesome as we can possibly make it.
An Awesomage is a boarding school.
An Awesomage is a school at the centre of a community, with a safe harbour inside it.
Children come every day and go home at night. Their families get the support a missing parent would have given. When home stops being safe, even for one night, there is a bed, an adult they already know, and a door that locks from the inside.
A · Every day
A school
Real teaching, mentoring and meals. Open to fee-paying and free pupils alike. The reason a child walks through the door.
B · Around it
Family support
Help for the carer: guardianship papers, health, food, someone to call. Keeps the child at home, and the home standing.
C · When needed
Safe harbour
A small number of beds, staffed day and night, for a child who cannot go home tonight. Short stays, with a plan to go back from the first night.
The family stays at the centre. The grandmother remains the guardian; we help her keep that role. The safe harbour exists for the nights that go wrong. It is not where a childhood is meant to happen.
We want to create stimulating, safe and sustainable places where we deliver education, development, health, fitness, play and love. We train every mentor ourselves.
What we do not know yet
What each country will license. Housing a child overnight is regulated care. In Peru, tighter rules cut the home we partnered with from 30–40 children to 10.
How it avoids becoming an orphanage by drift. A limit on stay, a plan home from the first night, and someone whose job is to say no to “just a bit longer”.
Who pays for the nights. A school can charge fees; a crisis bed cannot. The
Get involved page is where that gets solved, or does not.