About Us

Since its founding in 1938, ChildFund International has reached more than 100 countries with programs and services for children valued at approximately $4.5 billion. The organization supports the holistic development of children, connecting them with the people and resources they need to grow up healthy, educated, skilled, and safe.

Our primary focus is protecting children from violence, abuse, exploitation, and neglect, as these can instantly erase a child's positive development. Approximately 1 billion children worldwide experience violence each year, potentially causing incalculable harm.

The organization was founded in response to the violence experienced by children during the Second Sino-Japanese War. A Presbyterian minister from Richmond, Virginia, J. Calvitt Clarke, established a sponsorship mechanism to assist individual children, leading to the formation of what would later become the China's Children's Fund.

China's Children's Fund quickly expanded throughout Asia and, eventually, worldwide, changing its name to the Christian Children's Fund (CCF) in 1951. For its first two decades, the organization primarily cared for war orphans by sending financial support from sponsors to orphanages and schools. Many of these institutions were led by foreign missionaries, and the CCF's overseas staff consisted largely of North Americans.

In the 1960s, the organization's focus began to shift to a developmental approach, reaching not only orphans but also children in families through community-based programs known as family helper projects.

The 1970s and 1980s marked a further evolution in how we work, moving toward the community development model of serving children that exists today. This shift embodied a new focus that not only addressed the root causes of poverty but also helped communities tap into their own resources to assess their children's needs and design their own locally relevant programs to address them.

This new approach also includes a shift from funding our local partner organizations through third parties—foreign missionaries and other nonprofits like the Salvation Army—to funding them directly and training them to manage those funds. This all aligns with a shift in leadership in our country offices from expatriate staff to citizens living in the program countries. These new leaders better understand the local context and priorities and are therefore better able to facilitate more relevant services for children there. In the years that followed, CCF developed and launched signature interventions that further defined the organization's role in connecting children with the people and resources they need to thrive. One is our Child-Centered Spaces, which are safe places for children to play and access services during emergencies; another is our Early Childhood Development program, which focuses on supporting children during their earliest and most critical developmental years.

In 2002, CCF became a founding member of the ChildFund Alliance, a network of 11 like-minded member organizations united as a global force for children. In 2009, we became ChildFund International, reflecting our global brand and the inclusive, international scope of our work for children.

The transformative work of the early 2000s began in 2003, when we published a poverty study that debunked many myths about children and poverty. Listening to children themselves revealed that they experience poverty differently than adults, experiencing not only deprivation but also exclusion from opportunities and the resulting vulnerability to risks. This led to a reinvention of our approach to incorporate listening to children as a critical element of our future programming. Since then, children's voices have been a key driver of our approach.

Recently, the voices of young people have inspired increased understanding of the greatest risks facing children in poverty: violence, exploitation, abuse, and neglect. They have increasingly made it clear that protecting against these risks is key to children's ability to fully enjoy their rights and reach their potential. ChildFund's latest five-year strategy, which ends in 2020, centers on a commitment to deepen its focus on child protection across its programs.

In early 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic prompted ChildFund's largest-ever emergency response, working with the ChildFund Alliance to reach 6.3 million children and families in 60 countries. Thanks to ChildFund's flexible and efficient funding model and its extensive relationships around the world, the organization was able to quickly pivot its operations to maintain families' access to food and basic necessities through cash assistance, protect children's health, keep children safe from violence, and sustain education by providing digital and physical learning materials and opportunities. Building on the COVID-19 experience, employee-led ideas and explorations, and learnings from ongoing projects, we are currently developing a new 10-year global strategy for 2030 to achieve the ambitious goal of doubling our reach to children living in poverty with meaningful impact that helps them grow up healthy, educated, skilled, and safe.

Presence in Indonesia Since our name was Christian Children's Fund, we have been serving Indonesian children since 1958. In 1973, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Social Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia. In line with the rebranding, since 2009, we have been known as ChildFund International in Indonesia.