Orphans Feeding Foundation (OFF)

Orphans Feeding Foundation (OFF) has been supporting orphans and vulnerable people globally since 2011. For the past 2 years, our main focus is on the children of Ukraine:

• We reunite families with their forcibly deported children
• We evacuate the vulnerable from frontline villages
• We deliver emergency humanitarian aid to the children and people in need

At OFF, we believe that all children should be given the opportunity to learn and grow equally, regardless of their background, family situation or geopolitical environment. Our mission is to provide access to food, education and medicine to the children and vulnerable communities in the regions we work, in particular in armed conflict areas, and advocate for a fair and free world by being their voice in front of the international decision makers.

OFF was founded in the Netherlands, with a primary goal to support orphans and vulnerable communities in Western Kenya, who had to fight poverty, hunger and corruption to survive. Over the past decade, the organisation has provided medicine and food to various orphanages in Asia and Africa, raised funds to fight against hunger and poverty in Europe, and built schools in various remote locations of Africa.

In February 2022, as the full-scale war on Ukraine broke out, the foundation activated its network of government members, ambassadors, pharmaceutical companies and logistics providers to deliver - in person - emergency humanitarian relief to the civilians and hospitals all along the front line, from Kharkiv to Kherson. Over the next 2 years, more than 150 tons of food, medicine, generators, stoves and warm winter clothes were personally delivered to hospitals and civilians in need, oftentimes under constant shelling.

Since May 2023, OFF works under a Memorandum of Understanding signed with the Presidential Office of Ukraine to support the return of the thousands deported children through their Bring Kids Back UA programme.

Thousands of children are known to have been illegally deported away from their homes in Ukraine. And thousands more are still missing! According to the Ukrainian authorities, 19,546 Ukrainian children have been identified as illegally displaced. But this number is very likely much higher, as it is impossible to know exactly what happens beyond the front line. The opposition even claims to have “saved” 744,000 Ukrainian children from the war, while the Yale Institute estimates the number to be between 200,000 and 300,000.

In the first 2 years of the programme, 388 children have been returned. Orphans Feeding Foundation is bringing its expertise and network to return many more children through the following 5 main axis:

• Trace and identify the missing children of Ukraine

• Cover the logistics of the returns all the way to Kyiv

• Actively advocate for international awareness and pressure through diplomatic meetings and keynote speeches at the UN, the EU, the Brazilian congress and many other government representatives

• Prevent further abductions of children through regular evacuations of hundreds of civilians from the front line villages

• Support the reunited families by building new reintegration centres in safer areas of Ukraine, where we provide psychological, medical and logistical support