In Partnership with The SOS Children’s Villages – the worlds largest orphan charity, we are creating small family businesses in India for poor families with the profits we make from Tobysshoes.com.
With the profits we make from every 5 pairs of Tobysshoes sold, we help create a new business… We also help with ‘Family Strengthening Programmes’.
The concept is pretty simple… We collect in £40 profit from each pair of shoes we sell. It costs £200 to build a new business for people in poverty in India (businesses like Seamstresses and Tayloring Services, candle making and basket making enterprises). So for every 5 pairs of Tobysshoes we sell, we have enough money to build a business. Each new business owner is trained up by local people and is given help with their marketing, premises hire and equipment costs – The business though, is owned by them.
Each new business owner can then potentially become the ‘mother’ for children who have been abandoned and who cannot get a place in an orphanage…
The SOS Social Centre caters to the local community and offers family strengthening programmes. These programmes are intended to support families at risk of abandoning their children and to encourage families to stay together. SOS Children’s Villages therefore works with local authorities and other service providers to support families and enable them to take good care of their children. The Alwaye-Cochin SOS Social Centre provides nutritional, educational and health care as well as vocational training, career counselling sessions and job placement support. Families are linked with existing self-help groups; if there is no group, a new one is formed. The SOS Social Centre also tries to raise awareness of hygiene and child rights and to improve people’s parenting skills. At the affiliated day-care centre, young children of poor local families are looked after during the day so that their parents can go to work.
SOS Children cares and supports children who have lost, or who are at risk of losing, the care of their biological family. Family strengthening programmes aim to prevent children from losing the care of their family. We strengthen families ability to protect and care for their children, and strengthen safety nets for vulnerable children and their families within the community. Where children have lost the care of their biological family, we provide family-based care within our SOS Children’s Villages.
The Bikila encourages a more natural, healthier forefoot strike.
