Who we are
BEGINNINGS AND VISION
The vision for Asian Pacific Childrens Fund was born in 2002 when APCF President and founder Don McAlvany and his wife Molly encountered an orphan’s home in the Philippines.
​
We began to understand that there are millions of needy children across Asia who need the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, education, and even more importantly — love and nurturing. Some are in children's homes (or orphanages) and many are not. Many of the homes are well run by loving, caring staff, but some are just holding tanks, and in some, the children actually experience abuse.
​
But in the Philippine home we encountered (and many more since then), the children were happy; well cared for; loved by a staff who treated them like they were their own children; they were being educated up through the university level; and were being taught principles of how to live successful, productive, meaningful lives.
​
What a contrast – from the poverty, deprivation, and abuse of the streets (or of their small villages) to the caring, loving family atmosphere of this home.
​
They had come from pain, poverty, and no hope for their future, to a place of laughter, acceptance, love, and personal growth.
THROW AWAY CHILDREN
As we soon learned, this is not the reality of tens of millions of orphans, and street children throughout the Third World – who are “throw away children” that no one wants, loves, or cares for.
​
Millions of such children die on the streets or in poor Third World villages each year – with no one to love them, care for them, or even notice their pitiful lives--or in many cases, their very early deaths. They have no one to hug them, hold them, care for them or take care of their most basic needs. It is not that they are just forgotten – no one even noticed they were there – that they even existed.
​
These children are considered non-persons (non-existent) – and their lives, pain, poverty, and deaths are not even a small blip on the world’s radar screen. If they survive their childhoods, they have nothing to look forward to but more pain and poverty. They will not be educated or trained for productive lives.
SEX TRAFFICKING | CHILD PROSTITUTION
Another sad reality is that over 2 million young girls (aged 5 to 13) are sold or trafficked into prostitution each year in Asia. Some are even locked in cages (like animals) only to come out when forced to have sex with evil male perverts—often ten to twenty times a day (or more).
​
They finally emerge on the streets at about age 15 where they will ply the only trade they know until they die of AIDS (usually in their twenties).
​
The few thousand young girls who do escape from forced prostitution or are rescued from their slavery often have nowhere to go except to the streets – where many have to steal or go back to prostitution to survive.
THE NEED
So, we realized that there is a tremendous need in Asia (and throughout the Third World) for well-run homes for children – where loving, caring staff can give these children the basics of life: food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education – and a loving family environment – where they can have their physical and emotional wounds healed; where they can be nurtured, trained, educated and prepared for productive lives in a very unfriendly and challenging world.
THE VISION OF APCF
The vision of the Asian Pacific Childrens Fund is to find well-run, largely unknown Asian children’s homes – homes that are on no one’s radar screen – and to help them to raise funding and bring in resources which they need to survive and prosper.
​
These resources include: finances; staffing; food; clothing; English teachers (English is essential if these children are eventually to get good jobs); medical and dental teams; and university or trade school education for students with the desire, motivation, and grades to go beyond high school.
​
APCF currently supports 8 such orphans homes--three in the Philippines; two in Indonesia; one in India; one in Nepal; and one in Myanmar (Burma).
​
We will expand the number of homes which we “adopt” (as the resources become available) to 10, 20, 30, or more. A photo gallery of the homes and children) are viewable on this website. We cannot help most of the tens of millions of Asian/Third World orphans, street children and child prostitutes, as much as we wish we could.
​
But we are helping to give life, hope, and a future to almost 500 of these children at this time—and would like to ultimately be helping 5000 children as the funding becomes available.
