Save the Children
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses, see Save the Children (disambiguation).
Save the Children is an international non-profit organization dedicated to working for children.
The current stated mission (of its UK branch) is to "fight for children in the UK and around the world who suffer from poverty, disease, injustice and violence" and "work with them to find lifelong answers to the problems they face'.
Basing its operations on the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, Save the Children works worldwide to provide emergency relief as well as long-term development and prevention work to help children, their families and communities to be self-sufficient. Since 1995, Save the Children (UK) has hosted the international Child Rights Information Network (CRIN) as a long-term project.
There are 27 Save the Children organisations in the International Save the Children Alliance, making improvements for children in over 111 countries (see where Save the Children works worldwide [1])
As well as long term programmes the organisation responds immediately to emergencies such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, AIDS, and food crises around the world.
[edit] History
The Save the Children Fund was founded in London, England in 1919 by Eglantyne Jebb and her sister Dorothy Buxton. Their goal then was to create 'a powerful international organisation, which would extend its ramifications to the remotest corner of the globe'.
Originally an offshoot of the Fight The Famine Council, a group set up to campaign against the Allied blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary after the First World War, the Save the Children Fund was created to raise money to send emergency aid to children suffering as a consequences of the wartime shortages of food and supplies, which were continuing partly as a result of the blockade. A counterpart, Rädda Barnen (which means "Save the Children"), was founded later that year in Sweden, and together with a number of other organisations working for children - some using the Save the Children name or a local variant - they founded the International Save the Children Union in Geneva in 1920. Under the banner of this organisation, emergency relief was distributed to children in several countries.
The Fund was innovative in its use of fundraising techniques, and was the first charity in the United Kingdom to use page-length advertisements in newspapers. The movement was not intended to last long, and as conditions in western Europe improved, there were expectations that it would be wound down. However, conflict continued, and emergency funds continued to be raised following the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and the Russian famine of 1921.
By the middle of the 1920s the organisation began to face what would become a continuing problem - they had developed a highly efficient and professional charitable organisation, one of the best of its time, and yet the wartime crisis conditions that had created it were coming to an end. As the emergencies receded, income began to fall dramatically.
Their response was to change focus in two ways: the first was to concentrate on smaller, more targeted work; it was at this time that the Fund first began to run projects in the United Kingdom. The second was to look at the broader picture of children's rights in general.
In 1923, Jebb wrote: "I believe we should claim certain Rights for the children and labour for their universal recognition, so that everybody - not merely the small number of people who are in a position to contribute to relief funds, but everybody who in any way comes into contact with children, that is to say the vast majority of mankind - may be in a position to help forward the movement." The result was the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, drafted by Jebb, which was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. This was the first important assertion of the rights of children as separate from adults, and began the process that would lead to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations in 1989 and now ratified by nearly all countries worldwide.
The Declaration became, in effect, the mission statement of the Save the Children movement. It sustained the organisation after Jebb's death in 1929 and on into the lean years of the 1930s, when income shrank to a trickle. Indeed, inspired by the document's universal commitment, Save the Children began to work beyond Europe, promoting an international conference on conditions for children in Africa in 1931, and opening a nursery school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1936. Despite this, the general direction of the organisation's work was in response to the prevailing economic and political climate. In 1936, it published Unemployment and the Child, a study of the effects of the Great Depression on children. In the same year, the school just opened in Ethiopia had to shut suddenly when the country was invaded by Italy.
As the 1930s drew to an end, the increasing international tension was to affect the organisation's work even more. Assistance was given to Basque child refugees from the Spanish Civil War and Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. The growing likelihood of an international conflict led to an attempt to promote a convention on the treatment of children in wartime. Such optimistic ideas were quickly swept aside by the start of the Second World War.
In wartime, aid was concentrated mainly in the United Kingdom. From early on, however, planning began for dealing with the anticipated need for postwar relief work. When the war ended, Save the Children staff were among the first into the liberated areas, working with refugee children and displaced persons in former occupied Europe, including survivors of concentration camps. At the same time, work in the United Kingdom focused on improving conditions for children growing up in cities devastated by bombing and facing huge disruptions in family life.
The 1950s saw a continuation of this type of crisis-driven work, with additional demands for help following the Korean War and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, but also the opening of new work in Africa, Asia and the Middle East in response to the decline in Britain's colonial empire.
Like other aid agencies, Save the Children was active in the major disasters of the era - especially the Vietnam War and the Biafra secession in Nigeria. The latter brought shocking images of child starvation onto the television screens of the West for the first time in a major way. The sort of mass-marketing campaigns first used by Save the Children in the 1920s were repeated, with great success in fundraising, although questions would later be asked as to the long-term effects of such images on the popular consciousness.
By the 1970s, Save the Children was one of the major aid agencies in the United Kingdom, and with a sufficiently secure place in the British establishment to merit a member of the Royal Family, Princess Anne, as its president. In some quarters this was seen as an unwelcome change from the independent attitude of the early years; in the 1930s, royal patronage had been refused because of the Fund's criticisms of the German government's anti-semitic policies. In 1969, with the formal title of 'Save the Children Fund' now usually shortened to the snappier 'Save the Children', left-wing film director Ken Loach was asked to make a film to promote the organisation's work. The resulting work, idiosyncratic and highly critical, was found so offensive that they attempted to have it destroyed; it has never had a public screening. A generation later in 1994, Save the Children drew more negative attention to itself when it jettisoned the fundraising services of entertainer Sandi Toksvig after she came out as a lesbian.[2] Protests by the Lesbian Avengers made them reconsider their position.[3]
This had little effect on the public's support. Disasters in Ethiopia, Sudan, and many other world hotspots, led to appeals which brought public donations on a huge scale, and a consequent expansion of the organisation's work. However, the children's rights-based approach originated by Eglantyne Jebb continues to be an important factor, with, for example, a major campaign in the late 1990s against the use of child soldiers.
