1950's Europe

1950's- Moving Across Europe

In 1953, a newspaper article about Gmeiner inspired a young French teacher named Gilbert Cotteau to visit the Austrian founder of the SOS Children’s Village in Imst. In 1956, standing side by side the two visionaries watched construction officially begin for the Village d’Enfants SOS de Busigny, in northern France.

SOS’s Village at Busigny became the first outside of Austria. It sits sixty miles east of Amiens, surrounded by fields and woods and today houses sixty children.

Gmeiner’s vision to provide loving homes to children reached Germany through Jurgen Froelich, the first CEO of the German SOS Children’s Village Association who dedicated 50 years of his life to SOS.

That nation’s first SOS Children’s Village opened in 1956 in Diessen, a beautiful lake town twenty miles from Munich. SOS Europe soon spread. Italy opened its first SOS Village in 1963. Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Spain broke ground for their own SOS Villages in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, associations to raise funds and gain publicity for SOS Villages around the world were born in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, and Great Britain.

Spread to Eastern Bloc

SOS work did not go unchallenged, especially in the Eastern Bloc. SOS Children’s Villages set up a facility in Czechoslovakia as early as 1970, but faced obstacles to its work because of the political climate at the time. However, a Village was opened in Poland in 1983 and another in Hungary in 1986.

The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 paved the way for more SOS Villages in Eastern Europe — in Bulgaria and Romania (1993), Estonia (1994), and in Albania, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus (1995). SOS tries to open Villages in areas where conditions for children are most dire. The Belarusian Village in Minsk was built to help children suffering from medical conditions due to the Chernobyl disaster.

Violent events in the former Yugoslavia presented one of SOS’s greatest challenges in Europe. SOS Children’s Villages was one of the few aid organizations that was active in the country during the series of bitter ethnic Balkan conflicts that took place from 1991 to 2001. SOS facilities are now thriving in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, and Croatia.

France and Germany, sites of the first SOS Villages outside of Gmeiner’s Austria, today host a wide SOS network that even extends beyond Europe. SOS Children’s Villages operates in twelve locations in France and one in French Polynesia, and serves 600 children and youth.

SOS France also supports twenty-five Villages caring for 4,900 children outside of France — in Morocco, Cameroon, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Mali. Germany is now home to fifteen Children’s Villages, including nine in (former) East German cities.

To SOS mother Constanze Lucke, Hermann Gmeiner’s philosophy, “to do more than you need to” in caring for children, fit her life’s aim. She had worked for ten years in a Children’s home in Brandenburg — “a less-than ideal situation” for the children there, she says. She was told that the babies should not be picked up so often because they’d get spoiled. “I could not uphold those views. You can only convey security by cuddling,” says Lucke, SOS mother at the Brandenburg Village since 1998.

Today Europe is home to some 350 SOS facilities that include a hundred Children’s Villages, as well as youth facilities, social centers, and a host of kindergartens, vocational training centers, Hermann Gmeiner schools, and a medical center. Collectively, staff at these facilities have served more than 92,000 children and youth.