Our work began with street children, and they are still at the very heart of what we do.  The drop-in centre provides welfare services to children and youth either living on or spending most of their day on the streets. It is a safe space that provides a doorway for our team of social workers to assess, visit and develop a care plan for each child. Visitors to the drop-in centre can access education, showers, food, mentoring and life skills.

The drop-in centre team reach out to children living in extremely vulnerable situations. Gang activity, drugs, trafficking and exploitation is rife in this population. The drop-in team is proactive in seeking out these children, working with their families to identify the underlying issues and giving the children a safe and secure environment everyday.

We serve around 1000 hot meals every month and regularly help with medical assistance. As well as helping the children catch up on their education with high quality teaching, we also want to give them some childhood memories they have so far missed out on. Every week, we take the children on outings to the beach, park or zoo. They love this opportunity to get out of the city and have fun like children should.

There has been a visible decrease in the numbers of children sleeping on the streets in Talisay and that is largely due to our drop-in centre. The local government do not have any other facilities for street kids and we work closely with them in reporting, evaluating and supporting at-risk children.

It is testament to our efforts that visitors to the drop-in centre have fallen dramatically over the last 10 years we’ve been working in Talisay. Several years ago, numbers were up towards 100 visitors, now we have around 30 regular clients. This is thanks to our schooling programme, residential homes and social workers, who work tirelessly to get children off the streets, in school and back with their parents.