Lumos Celebrates 20 Years of Impact and Sets Ambitious Goals for the Next 10 Years

03.11.2025

Pictured: J.K. Rowling, Lumos Founder and Life President, with Howard Taylor, Lumos CEO. Photography by Joel Luedtke © Lumos Foundation.

3 November 2025 – London. This week, Lumos, the international children’s organisation founded by J.K. Rowling, is celebrating two decades of transforming care systems for children and families around the world – marking a major milestone of having helped more than 280,000 children and young people grow up in safe, loving families instead of institutions.

Lumos partners with governments, civil society, and communities to reform care systems, prevent family breakdown, and reunite children separated from their families. From early childhood intervention in Moldova, to care reform in Kenya and Colombia and emergency aid in Ukraine, Lumos’ work continues to show that lasting change is possible when children are placed at the heart of decision-making.

Twenty years ago, I founded Lumos after learning about millions of children worldwide living locked away from their families. For 20 years, Lumos has been illuminating a better path – working with partners to reform care systems, prevent family breakdown and reunite children with families. We’ve achieved a lot, but there is still much more to do so that every child grows up in a safe and loving family.

-J.K. Rowling, Lumos Founder and Life President.

Looking ahead, Lumos plans to expand its impact globally, building on lessons learned over two decades.

The context in which Lumos works today is very different from 20 years ago… This moment of change presents an opportunity to reshape care and child protection systems to work more effectively and impactfully in the years ahead.

-Howard Taylor, Lumos CEO.

As Lumos enters its third decade, the organisation will accelerate proven approaches – preventing family separation, strengthening community-based services, and supporting care reform worldwide – to ensure that every child can grow up in a safe and loving family.

In the next 10 years, Lumos will support more children in more countries, more quickly, by:

• Enabling 500,000 children in care to return to family-based care; and
• Preventing 10 million children from experiencing family breakdown and separation – so that they can thrive in their own families.

Working with local, national and global partners, Lumos will accompany government-led, systemic and sustainable change in the way children are cared for across Asia, Africa, Europe, Middle East, and Latin America.

Lumos’ ambition for children is significant and will require the organisation and its partners to work in new ways – with a pace, drive and urgency that this moment demands – and that children everywhere deserve.

About Lumos

Lumos works to realise every child’s right to a family by transforming care systems around the world. Our vision is a world in which all children grow up in safe and loving families within supported communities.

Founded in 2005 by author J.K. Rowling, Lumos partners with governments, civil society and young people with lived experience to transform care systems globally and advocate for family-based solutions that help children thrive. We ensure that families receive the support they need to stay together or reunite, and that children grow up in family-based settings such as foster or kinship care, not institutions. Despite clear evidence of the harms of institutionalisation, an estimated 5.4 million children worldwide continue to live in institutions. And a much larger number of children are at risk of institutionalisation – those living in poverty, experiencing domestic violence and abuse, and living in countries affected by conflict.

Media Contacts

Please contact Freya Paleit, Deputy Director of Communications at [email protected].