Our aims...

Railway Children was founded in 1996 with the following objective:

'The relief of children and young persons under 25 years of age who are in conditions of need, hardship or distress, anywhere in the world and in particular those who are living on the streets’.

Since then Railway Children has worked with thousands of vulnerable children and young people living alone and at risk on the streets.

During the last year alone 27,756 children and young people living in UK, India, Tanzania and Kenya have benefitted from our work.

Railway Children focuses its work specifically on the relief of children and young people living alone and at risk on the streets in need of care and protection. All of our organisational activity seeks to meet this aim through our mission statement –

Our mission is to ensure effective interventions and collective action in creating sustainable change in the lives of children living alone and at risk on the streets. We deliver our mission through a comprehensive strategy and change agenda that directs all our work towards the relief of children in need.

Our principal activity in achieving our mission is the engagement of focused and innovative partnerships and initiatives with locally based voluntary organisations. Genuine partnerships continue to be the cornerstone of our work and this method of working ensures contextual understanding of children’s needs, cost effectiveness and greater ability to mobilise civil society members.

Our active partnerships attend to our change agenda at a local level by promoting and supporting early intervention and home placement strategies. This work looks to meet the immediate needs of street children alongside attending to their long term care. Our change agenda also seeks to evoke social change, this level of our work is critical as it seeks to change negative perceptions of street children in service of reducing the high levels of violence and abuse many of these children are subjected to. We attend to this element of our work both locally with key stakeholders and nationally with key decision makers.