Many thanks to everone who is working to help!

Volunteers in the UK

Time can often be a more valuable a donation as money.

We welcome any assistance that helps to raise awareness and funds. Please contact us, or see the how to help page.

Volunteers in Salvador

If you live in Salvador and can offer assistance or contacts who might be able to help then we would love to hear from you.

We do not at present have a volunteer programme for people visiting Salvador.

We hope to offer volunteer places when the new orphanage opens later this year, but we will post information on the web site if we do.

A note about Volunteers who wish to travel to Brazil

Each year we do get several people writing to us to ask about volunteer placements.

We would love to welcome people to help in Salvador, but the reality is that it is generally far too dangerous - even our trustees don't venture some places on our own.

A suitable person would need to be:

• fluent in Portuguese (or at least pretty good conversational)
• well traveled & street wise in "third world" situations
• self financing (any money we raise goes directly to help the children)
• have suitable experience of working with children (or other useful expertise).

Generally students do not meet these criteria - but you could visit for a few days and then return home and try and raise some support!!

Whilst we appreciate all well meaning requests and offers much of the work we do is in some of the poorest and most dangerous parts of Salvador - these areas are not entirely safe for Brazilian nationals, and can be positively dangerous for tourists and travelers.

You are most welcome to visit one or more of the projects, but we strongly advise you go with one of our representatives, both for your safety, for communication (unless you speak fluent Portuguese) and out of courtesy to the project (who will have someone on hand they know and trust and can explain things to).

We do hope to set up some formal group visits where people can become involved and help in a ractical way but as we write this (Jan 2009) this is some way off yet.

Please see the "visiting Bahia" page for more information.