SOS children's villages

The goal of SOS Children’s Villages is to provide children whose original family do not want them or cannot look after them with a new home full of love and understanding. The first SOS Children’s Village was established in 1949 in the Austrian city of Imst. Unfortunately, the need to care for children at risk, who have been taken from their original families for various reasons, is still a topical issue. Consequently, SOS Children’s Villages were also established in other parts of the world during the second half of the 20^th century.  Today, there are villages operating in 132 countries around the globe.

In the former Czechoslovakia, the idea of SOS Children’s Villages appeared in the second half of the 1960s in connection with the general liberalisation of the political situation and the concomitant mobilisation of civil society. In 1968, a group called “Friends of the SOS Children’s Village” was established and a nationwide collection was launched whose proceeds were meant to be used for the construction of SOS Children’s Villages. In 1974, however, SOS Children’s Villages were forcibly placed under state control, and the activity of the SOS Children’s Villages civic association was not renewed until after 1989.

At present, the SOS Children’s Villages Association runs three SOS Children’s Villages in the Czech Republic. The oldest of these was established in 1969 in Karlovy Vary – Doubí. In 1973, an SOS village began operating in Chvalčov, a small village beneath Hostýn Hill in the Zlín region. Another SOS village was subsequently opened in Brno – Medlánky in 2003.