(Street Kids‘ Community Villages)
...was founded in 1984 by Matthew Norton, respectively Sriman Manihara, who grew up in Great Britain and fled at the age of 16 to escape from the school system, which was oppressive in his eyes. In this time he was homeless himself. Currently, the projects consist of a girls’ centre, Amodini, and one for boys, Prema Vihar. Beside these villages, which present a permanent accommodation and a new home for the kids, there is a night shelter, Santosh Bhavan, as a first contact point. Altogether the project cares for circa 200 children at the age of 5 – 19 years, who ran away from home, live on the street and/or were separated from their families by the chaos of an Indian rail station. Extraordinary: since Manihara’s dead, called pataji (=father), young people are active in the management of SKCV – they are former street kids themselves, lived in the project and got a new perspective at the hands of it. They managed to redeploy the focus of donations from Great Britain to India, which renders SKCV independent and ongoing.
Further information: www.skcv.org