SOS Children's Villages Latvia Information

SOS Children’s Villages Latvia is a social charity organization that provides a long-term family based care for children who have lost their parents. It also carries out family strengthening programs, helping high risk and financially struggling families to improve their situation, so that children at risk could stay in the caring environment of their own biological families. The organization operates in Latvia since 1997. Our work is based on a child-centered approach, taking into consideration every child’s individual needs and rights. Without doubt, family is the most suitable environment for a child, and therefore SOS Children’s Villages is committed to providing new homes and families to those children who have lost care of their own parents. Family strengthening is another important field of our work. We provide support to families with children, who are in risk of losing care of their biological family. SOS Latvia currently has 3 Family Strengthening projects – in Riga, Valmiera and Bauska. Families receive social workers’ support, assistance of psychologists, psychotherapists, special pedagogues, lawyers and other specialists, whose services cannot be provided by social departments of local municipalities due to lack of resources. We are helping more than 400 children yearly with our Family Strengthening projects. The Association’s National Office, in Riga has a function of coordinating and supervising the work of all SOS facilities – 2 SOS Children’s Villages (in Islice, Bauska district and in Valmiera), SOS Youth Facility in Jelgava and 3 Family Strengthening Projects.