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Transforming care

Lumos helps countries change health, education and social services, making them available to all children and families. We carefully reunite children living in orphanages with their families.

This holistic process includes:

  • Developing community services to replace institutions: strengthening universal services such as health, education and social care as well as developing targeted services for those more vulnerable children and families with complex support needs.
  • Preventing children from entering institutions: putting in place specific mechanisms, regulations and legislation that make it difficult for a child to be taken from their family in the first instance.
  • Moving children from institutions to family-based care: where not suitable, family-type placements that meet the needs of the child are selected.
  • Ring-fencing and transferring resources: protecting resources including budgets and personnel which are then transferred to deliver community-based services.
  • Changing attitudes, policies and practices: helping to foster an understanding of different ways to meet the needs of children, rather than making the children fit in with existing practices and systems.
  • Empowering children and families to take an active role in the process: ensuring they have a leading role in implementing changes and have a voice in making the decisions that will affect their lives.

Explaining ‘Deinstitutionalisation’