In mid 2004, child services clinical director and mental health counselor Laura Peterson gave up dealing with the symptomatic problems endemic in the US foster care program and decided to tackle causes. That winter she founded Hands to Hearts International, an organization dedicated to changing the plight of orphaned children around the world; an organization dedicated to changing the condition of impoverished women unable to contribute to their families or their communities.

What drove Peterson out of well paying positions within the US child care system into unpaid work developing child care programs in orphanages in southern India? “I was tired of the fact that we reached kids too late,” she says. “And by too late, I mean children at age five who are already bailing out of multiple foster homes and adoptions, and at age five in the US, taken into their first psychiatric institution with serious mental health issues.

“I wanted to reach the most children at the earliest time in the simplest most cost-effective and most replicable system possible.”

With that formula in mind, Peterson left the US with its entrenched foster care system and traveled to India, a nation which still uses orphanages as the program of choice. Seeing hundreds of untouched babies lying listless in rows of metal cribs, serviced like stock animals by harried, uneducated staff members broke her heart. All too well she knew that there’s a critical window when 90% of brain development happens between age zero and age three and infants can learn attachment and bonding. All too well she knew that with no nurturing touch, love or consistent care-giving, a child’s ability to form intimate, loving relationships is profoundly damaged, perhaps for a lifetime.

The ongoing spiral of depression, mental disorders, abuse, addictions, and criminal activity that often occur as such children grow older had to be stopped before the cycle of unwed motherhood, failed marriages and relationships, brought more children into the picture, only to be abandoned to experience the same things for yet another generation.

With entrepreneurial determination she formed Hands to Hearts International (HHI), which established a partnership with the Madras Social Service Guild, (MASOS) an orphanage that already had a track record of US and other western adoptions. Instead of focusing on just the problem: untouched, depressed babies, Peterson focused on solutions that could help not only the babies, but local women and their communities as well.  Next > 1 2 3 4