Twenty Years of Transformation, A Decade of Possibility Ahead
17.12.2025
Pictured: Members of the Lumos Board of Trustees, the Executive Team, and Lumos Founder and Life President, J.K. Rowling.
2025 has been an extraordinary year. Shifting geopolitics and security, economic volatility, and historical changes in foreign aid and philanthropy have fundamentally changed the global landscape.
Despite new challenges, Lumos and our partners around the world have continued to deliver for children who deserve nothing less than a loving family to call their own. And we have set out a bold new vision for our next decade.
Lives Changed, Futures Rewritten
2025 marked Lumos’ 20th Anniversary. Two decades ago, we dared to imagine a world where every child could grow up surrounded by love, not institutional walls. Today, that vision is becoming reality as we work in partnership at a global, national and local level to transform care systems.
This has been a landmark year for Lumos after 20 years of working to end the institutionalisation of children. We have renewed our ambition for the decade ahead, and across our programmes our impact has been remarkable:
- In Kenya, 42,000 people will benefit from Positive Parenting Service Centres supported by Lumos, as we work to bring over 13,500 children home from institutional care.
- In Moldova, our Early Childhood Intervention Centres are keeping 750 children with their families each year, while 22 young advocates on our Youth Advisory Board are reshaping national policy from the inside. Our models of inclusive education and early childhood interventions for children with disabilities are preventing at least 22,000 children from the family breakdown and separation.
- In Ukraine, amid unimaginable hardship, we’ve stood with families, providing winterization support to 5,200 households and critical cash assistance, ensuring that 3,300 children stay warm, fed, and together.
- In Colombia, we’re not just reforming care – we’re helping to reimagine it entirely, partnering with the government to design family-based models where young people themselves lead the conversation. And we are supporting development of the first national plan for deinstitutionalisation and childcare reform that will provide a family upbringing for over 11,000 children in institutional care.
The Power of Young Voices
Perhaps nothing captures our mission more powerfully than Vlad, standing before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March 2025. Or Dumitrita, commanding attention at the Global Disability Summit in Berlin in April 2025. Young people who once had no voice now shaping the policies that will protect the next generation. Every Lumos country programme now has an active Youth Advisory Board, because those with lived experience must lead the change.
A Bold Vision for Our Third Decade
Changes to the global landscape during 2025 have underscored the urgency of Lumos’ mission to transform care systems so that every child grows up in a safe and loving family. Disruption at this scale can and must spur innovation in global support for nationally-led childcare reform.
So we’re not slowing down. We’re scaling up. We’re exploring new regions, forging strategic alliances, and catalysing and supporting government-led transformation across continents. Our ambition is audacious: to reach millions more children in more countries, more quickly, ensuring that growing up in a safe, loving family isn’t a privilege, it’s a given.
Howard Taylor
Lumos CEO
