ARK has had another exceptional year and we are hugely grateful to so many people for making our plans a reality: to all of our benefactors, to the teams on the ground who deliver our programmes; and to ARK’s Trustees and Patrons, who ensure that 100% of donations go directly toward fulfilling our dream.
Every child, no matter what their background or circumstances, has the potential to succeed and to lead a fulfilled and enriching life. ARK’s programmes help unlock that potential, by providing life-saving health care, by strengthening families and by providing the educational opportunities that can change lives.
In South Africa and Mozambique, our programmes are releasing children from the burden of caring for their HIV+ parents and helping them access financial support to ensure they can attend school. This work has already reached over 50,000 children.
In Eastern Europe, we have removed over 1,600 children from detrimental institutional care, providing in its place nurturing, supportive environments that offer an education and real prospects for the future.
Through ARK’s Academies programme ARK has opened 3 schools in inner-city London boroughs with high levels of deprivation. We will open 3 more this September and aim to have at least 12 open around the country by 2012, with a faculty of 550 transforming the opportunities of more than 12,000 pupils. To extend our impact further, the Future Leaders programme will train over 500 school leaders for challenging urban schools for challenging UK schools.
This year we are taking the expertise we have developed in the UK to India, where our pilot School Leaders programme will train high-impact head teachers to deliver quality education to children living in extreme poverty.
I am particularly proud that under the leadership of ARK’s Managing Director, Paul Bernstein, we have built ARK into an incredibly strong international organisation of over 1000 people. Our ‘social investments’ have developed depth and increasing scale, as we deliver ambitious plans to transform the lives of many thousands more children.
Arpad A. Busson,
Chairman, ARK
May 2008