Manna Worldwide: Lifesong for Orphans Success Story

"Today there are 143 million orphans around the world,” says Lifesong vice president Andy Lehman

  In 1994 there were recorded 496,300 of these children as compared to 867,800 as of 1 January 2003. Along with this, only approximately 10% of this overall number of children without parental support became orphans as a result of the death or disablement of the parents; the rest are social orphans.

 

...The Manna Group Foundation ....uses profits from its food-processing operation here to pay administrative costs for Lifesong.

Every dime donated goes directly to child care. Every time you eat Kellogg’s cereal with freeze-dried strawberries, you may indirectly help an orphan somewhere around the world.

The Manna Group Foundation started with the proceeds from when Ringger sold Ringger Foods to Kerry Foods in 2001.

Over the last five years, Lifesong started a school in Zambia, three orphanages in Ukraine and five orphanages in India. It just began serving in Honduras this spring. Those facilities foster more than 1,600 children. The group has also provided funds for hundreds of other orphans to be placed in Christian families of their own here in the U.S.

“There’s little that people in Gary’s stage of life ‘want’,” Lehman says. “They want to move from success to significance.”

Worldwide an estimated 300 million children are subjected to violence, exploitation and abuse, including the worst forms of child labour in communities, schools and institutions, during armed conflict, and harmful practices such as female genital mutilation/cutting and child marriage.

...Some 1.5 billion children – two thirds of the world’s child population – live in the 42 countries affected by violent, high-intensity conflict between 2002 and 2006. But the impact of armed conflict on children is difficult to estimate because of the lack of reliable and up-to-date statistics.