Street Child Book

[Clide Birkner]

StreetChild sees a world where all children are safe, in school and learning. We specialise in supporting children and communities in low-resource environments and emergencies: recognising that the complex, compounded challenges that affect them require innovative, integrated interventions.

Joining the Street Child family means joining a team where you will have the opportunity to make a positive difference; encouraged by the dynamic and innovative approaches we take; inspired and challenged by the pace of growth and the problems we are solving and supported by your colleagues and the organisation to grow and bring your best.

Street Child is committed to providing a working environment in which staff and volunteers are able to realise their full potential and to contribute to its success irrespective of their gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, religion or religious belief. This is a key employment value to which all Street Child employees are expected to give their support.

Street Child believes that all staff, partner, volunteers, and beneficiaries have the right to work in a safe environment free from abuse and exploitation and therefore operates a firm zero-tolerance policy in relation to any form of abuse.

Competitive salary: As an organisation we commit to posting all roles with a salary, for roles where location may be a determining factor, we are happy to discuss salary ranges with all candidates.

By leveraging the power of video games, you can help us complete our mission to see all children safe, in school, and learning. Host a fundraising livestream today and unlock life-changing support for children around the world!

Walk, swim, cycle or run for Team Street Child in one of our incredible challenges. If you're looking to challenge yourself while having fun and raising money for a cause, browse our catalog of events!

We are experts in education, economic empowerment and protection programming. Our interventions are integrated to confront challenges, assuring safety as we afford access to schooling.

By coupling instantaneous change for children with an increase in the capacities of caregivers, communities and schools we support children to be safe, in school and learning in the long term.

We seek out situations where there are gaps between aid, assistance and need and, as such, are often one of the only organisations supporting children in these tough circumstances.

We prioritise children in the most marginalised populations and currently work in over 22 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

C Street opened its doors as a ministry to the community in the 1970's. When created, it began as a very small "nursery program" serving only a handful of children, mostly parishioner families. In 1992, it officially opened as an early childhood program with an average of 10-15 children attending. Over the years, it has grown into what is now considered to be a premier faith-based Early Childhood Program with over 70 spaces operating at max capacity and waiting lists for each classroom. C Street is still a community-based program, a ministry of the First Presbyterian Church of Salt Lake City, and open year round!

C Street was awarded global accreditation status by the National Association for the Education of Young Children in the summer of 2006. C Street has since re-accredited under the newly revised and rigorous standards. To learn more about NAEYC and what it says about this program, please visit them here.

Street children are poor or homeless children who live on the streets of a city, town, or village. Homeless youth are often called street kids, or urchins; the definition of street children is contested, but many practitioners and policymakers use UNICEF's concept of boys and girls, aged under 18 years, for whom "the street" (including unoccupied dwellings and wasteland) has become home and/or their source of livelihood, and who are inadequately protected or supervised.[1] Street girls are sometimes called gamines,[2][3][4] a term that is also used for Colombian street children of either sex.[5][6][7]

Some street children, notably in more developed nations, are part of a subcategory called thrown-away children, consisting of children who have been forced to leave home. Thrown-away children are more likely to come from single-parent homes.[8] Street children are often subject to abuse, neglect, exploitation, or, in extreme cases, murder by "clean-up squads" that have been hired by local businesses or police.[9]

Street children can be found in a large majority of the world's famous cities, with the phenomenon more prevalent in densely populated urban hubs of developing or economically unstable regions, such as countries in Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia.[10]

Comprehensive street level research, completed in the year 2000 in Cape Town[16] proved that international estimates of tens of thousands of street children living on the streets of Cape Town were incorrect. This research proved, that even with street children begging at every intersection, rivers of street children sleeping on the pavements at night, and with gangs of street children roaming around the streets, there were less than 800 children living on the streets of greater Cape Town at this time. This insight enabled a whole new approach to street children to be developed, one not based on the provision of basic care to masses of street children, but one focused on helping individual children, on healing, educating, stabilizing, and developing them permanently away from street life, as well as managing the exploitation of street children and the support factors that keep them on the street.

By 1922, there were at least seven million homeless children in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic due to the devastation from World War I and the Russian Civil War (see "Orphans in the Soviet Union").[19] Abandoned children formed gangs, created their own argot, and engaged in petty theft and prostitution.[20]

UNICEF works with CARITAS and with other non-governmental organizations in Kenya to address street children.[24] Rapid and unsustainable urbanization in the post-colonial period, which led to entrenched urban poverty in cities such as Nairobi, Kisumu, and Mombasa is an underlying cause of child homelessness. Rural-urban migration broke up extended families which had previously acted as a support network, taking care of children in cases of abuse, neglect, and abandonment.[25]

Street Children are legally protected by the South African Children's Act, Act 38 of 2005, which defines street children as "children living, working and begging on the street" and as "Children in need of Care and Protection". South Africa has done much to address street children and the South African government now partially funds street children organisations. Parents of vulnerable children can access a monthly child care grant, and organisations have developed effective street outreach, drop-in centres, therapeutic residential care, and prevention and early intervention services for street children.

Comprehensive Street level research, completed in the year 2000 in Cape Town,[16] proved that international estimates of tens of thousands of street children living on the street were incorrect. This research proved, that even with street children begging at every intersection, rivers of street children sleeping on the pavements at night, and with gangs of street children roaming around the streets, there were less than 800 children living on the streets of greater Cape Town at this time. This insight enabled a whole new approach to street children to be developed, one not based on the provision of basic care to masses of street children, but one focused on helping individual children, on healing, educating, stabilizing, and developing them permanently away from street life, as well as managing exploitation of street children and support factors that keep them on the street.[26]

This approach has effectively reduced the number of children living on the streets of Cape Town by over 90%, even with over 200 children continuing to move onto the street each year. It has also seen absconding-from-care rates decline to less than 7%, and the success rate for getting children off the street has reached 80 to 90%. The number of street-vulnerable children, that is the number of chronically neglected, sexually and physically abused, traumatized community children, remains however unacceptably high, with school drop-out rates a real concern and with schools battling to deal with the high number of traumatised children they have to contend with.

No recent statistics on street children in Bangladesh are available. UNICEF puts the number above 670,000 referring to a study conducted by Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, "Estimation of the Size of Street Children and their Projection for Major Urban Areas of Bangladesh, 2005". About 36% of these children are in the capital city Dhaka according to the same study. Though Bangladesh improved the Human Capital Index over the decades, (HDI is 0.558 according to the 2014 HDR of UNDP and Bangladesh at 142 among 187 countries and territories), these children still represent the absolute lowest level in the social hierarchy. The same study projected the number of street children to be 1.14m in year 2014.[28][29][30]

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