The vision of the Save Street Children Foundation is to help create a world where kids are loved, protected and cared for. Our organization hopes to act as a catalyst that will inspire the society and the future generations to extend compassion to these less-fortunate children as well as their families.
According to the recent Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS), one in every ten or about 4 million Filipino children and youth was out-of-school in 2013. FLEMMS defined out-of-school children as persons aged 6 to 14 years who are not attending school. Keeping these numbers in mind, we’ve decided to immediately start an additional program to pave the future of diligent children in desperate need of help. With this data in mind, we came up with the Save Street Children Student Financial Assistance Program which will start on School Year 2017-2018. We will be providing them with school supplies, daily meal allowance and additional grant for school projects from June 2017 until they graduate from Senior High School.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela
Pateros National High School
To spearhead the program, we visited Pateros National High School, a DepEd-managed urban secondary public school located in P. Herrera St. San Pedro, Pateros, Metro Manila, last March 16 to interview students who were pre-screened by the school’s guidance counselor, Mrs. Luz Raymundo, accompanied by one of the class advisers.
We asked them about their family, their school life, and their plans for the future. Most of them suffer from the scorching heat of the sun walking their way to school with meal allowance ranging from 5 to 20 pesos per day. How our hearts ached upon hearing their determination to finish their studies notwithstanding the challenges they are destined to face for their ambition to become a reality. These aspiring chefs, engineers, accountants and doctors almost made us cry with the stories of their usual struggles, the difficulty of maintaining their high grades in spite of their situation, and how their parents or grandparents manage to send them to school every single day. Some of the students even do part-time work to help their parents in financing not only their school expenses, but also of their siblings.
For us to be able to meet their parents and inform them about the Save Street Children Foundation and the Save Street Children Student Financial Assistance, we decided to go to their houses one by one.
We hope that the Save Street Children Foundation, with your support, can continue creating a brighter future for Filipino children.