A General Assembly to Remember
14/08/2008
It was with some trepidation that I travelled in Innsbruck in July for the general assembly of SOS Children's Villages International. These only happen every five years so it was my first. I know from a previous career that managers (like manure) often work better spread over the fields than in a single heap and it was hard to imagine that, in a big gathering of national directors, politics would not take over from philanthropy. But how cynical I turned out to be.
In a room of around five hundred people welcoming in turn directors and chairpersons of SOS Children associations in 130 countries took the best part of an hour but left me with an extraordinary sense of scale which numbers cannot convey. A country every 30 seconds for an hour. The fact that almost everyone was a national of their own country and in their national dress (I did not "wear wode" as a colleague suggested) just added to the sense of the international.
"SOS" started a speaker "is not an organisation, it is a movement; a movement for children". In some circumstances these words might have been saccharin sweet and false but looking around me it struck everyone the same way. What an extraordinary phenomenon and how great to be part of it. And if 130 countries seems a lot how does the 70,000 children seem? I mean, a child every five minutes day and night for a whole year...
A new strategy, "a million together"
And the new strategy agreed for 2009-2016 did not disappoint either. Endless talk but a clear agreement. Over the next eight years a million children will get to grow up in a family as a result of it. Of these one hundred thousand will be given a new family in an SOS Village and nine hundred thousand will be able to grow up with their own family (or extended family) with our support. This represents a big expansion of our Aids Orphan and Family Strengthening programmes but also a big growth in Villages for the children without viable family.
To pay for this all we need a million more sponsors and regular donors. I don't suppose you know anyone who doesn't sponsor any children yet?