Fundatia Inima De Copil

Our Mission

Fundatia Inima de Copil (Heart of a Child Foundation) was established in 1996 by a group of volunteers from Galati, Romania who decided to help the children in need. Today, the foundation has 30 employees and 30-40 volunteers monthly and supported in 23 years over 15.000 children and families.

Our mission is to provide a better life for children in Romania.We hope to enhance the life quality of children in Romania, by providing social services and we fight to protect children's rights.

All the projects carried out together with our sponsors and contributors are intended to reunite human and community resources, so that every child may benefit from home, a family, and fulfil their potential. Approximately 21,5% of Romanian children live in poverty, according to the Eurostat 2019 statistics, and this ratio is the highest in EU, where the media is 5,9%. Over 32% of children live in extreme poverty, shows a report issued by Save the Children and People's Advocate in 2019. This phenomenon is widely-spread and more worrying in rural areas. For example, almost 30% of the children from the organization's programs live in families with an income of less than 70 USD/month/ person. Another worrying figure is that 150.000 children go to sleep hungry at night, just before the COVID 19 crisis, and the statistics included only the children living in the rural area and it has been calculated on the basis of a study made in 2018 by Save the Children, in which 3% of children said that they are going to sleep hungry every night, and 5% just from time to time. The ones that are more exposed to this risk are the ones who have 2 or more siblings. At the same time, the data from the report indicates that Romania has the highest mortality rate of children from EU (2018 - 6,5.), with a separate chapter of mortality under 1 year old. More than half of the deaths under 1 year are produced in the first month of life (neonatal mortality). During the last years, the rate of school abandonment has remained high and worrying. 19% of the children at the national level and 25% of the ones from rural areas abandon school before finishing high-school. Most of them do this because of material deprivation or work exploitation when they are 12-14 years old. Functional illiteracy is also an alarming consequence of the inadaptation of the educational system to the needs of children. If we take into consideration the non-unified regional economical development of Romania and the high discrepancies between urban and rural areas, the highest number of children and families affected by poverty and its consequences are registered in SE and North and in rural areas. The nowadays COVID 19 crisis has emphasized these problems as people lost their jobs, the high number of children that did not have and still don't have access to digital education (the estimated number is 250.000 children at the national level and approx 12.000 in our area), the limited access to health services and hygienic supplies that translates into higher costs for families. In all these circumstances, our mission as an organisation is far more important. We are one of the most known and appreciated organisations that offer social services in the South East of Romania, having beneficiaries right now from 4 poor counties from Romania (Galati, Vaslui, Vrancea, Tulcea). Moreover, the present focus of the organisation and of future programs is concentrated on the rural area, on communities where we know that the chances for children's evolution are very limited without any support from the outside.