See the Difference You Made in 2024

Learn about Holt sponsor and donor impact in 2024 in the lives of children and families around the world!

You’re amazing! Through your heartfelt giving in 2024, you helped make a tremendous difference in the lives of over one million children, families and individuals around the world. Whether you provided regular support as a monthly child sponsor, gave on Giving Tuesday to help a girl go to school and stay safe from child trafficking and early marriage, helped a child with special needs receive the care they need to thrive through the Molly Holt Fund or helped meet one of our president’s year-end priorities for children in greatest need, you brought hope and opportunity to the lives of many of the world’s most vulnerable children and families. Keep reading to learn about some of the specific ways that your gifts to Holt made a difference in 2024!

While much of Holt’s work is community-based, your gifts also provided direct care and services to over 431,000 children this past year. Designed to provide the exact help a child needs at the time they need it, this kind of direct care includes everything from emergency food and safe shelter for a family in crisis to surgery or needed medical treatment for a child with special healthcare needs to foster care and social work support to help a child reunite with their family or join a family through adoption.

In 2024, you helped 181 children join permanent, loving families through adoption — 110 of them through international adoption, and 71 through domestic, in-country adoption to families living in the child’s country of birth. Overall, 95% of children adopted internationally were older than age 5, part of a sibling group or had at least some minor special needs. This past year, 65% of children placed internationally had moderate or major physical, cognitive or developmental disabilities. And while the number of children with complex special needs joining adoptive families internationally has increased, so has the number of older children. This past year, 64% of children were older than 5 at the time they joined their families — and 29% were between the ages of 10-18! This shift is a truly wonderful development for children who in prior years would watch as younger, healthier children left the orphanage to join families, while they stayed behind with little hope of ever being adopted. Your support of advocacy programs for older children like Holt’s Thailand and Philippines special needs programs — and the Colombia hosting program — has helped make this shift possible.

Today, the overall cost of international adoption exceeds the actual fees and expenses required to complete the process. This is one key reason why so many agencies have closed their doors in recent years. It’s only through the generous support of donors like you that Holt is able to continue this vitally important practice for children who cannot remain or reunite with their birth families, or join domestic adoptive families in their country of birth Thank you for supporting this vitally important path to a family for children who would otherwise grow up in, and age out of, orphanages overseas.

Visit our waiting child photolisting to learn about the more than 200 children waiting for families who are older or have complex special needs — and how you can begin the process to adopt, or support their journey to a family!

For children growing up in orphanages around the world, Holt stands by our belief that joining a family through adoption is the last, best option for them. For these children, an adoptive family provides the attentive, nurturing care that they need to achieve critical developmental milestones and to reach their potential in life. Countless studies have shown the detrimental emotional and developmental effects that long-term institutionalization has on children, and this is compounded for children who already have special medical or developmental needs — as is the case for many of the children growing up in orphanages overseas. This is why we stand by our commitment to continue international adoption for children in an ever-changing and increasingly challenging landscape.

But we also firmly believe that every child should have the chance to grow up in their birth family, and birth culture, whenever possible. Before we ever pursue adoption for a child, we first strive to help them grow up in the loving care of their birth family.  For children living in orphanages, this often means a long social work process to identify their immediate or extended family and explore the possibility of reunification. And in 2024, with donor support, Holt teams around the world helped reunite 302 children with their birth families — a significant number when you consider the time and resource-intensive work that goes into identifying relatives and ensuring children can thrive in their care.

But everywhere we work, our first goal is always to prevent family separation in the first place. And with the generous support of sponsors and donors, 29,023 children who were at risk of separation were able to remain in the loving care of their families in 2024. With support tailored to each individual child and family, you helped provide everything from clothing, warm bedding, safe housing and school supplies to livestock for nourishing food and income. In 2024, 4,405 individuals also participated in Holt-supported economic empowerment programs, including job skills training, education in how to grow gardens or tend livestock, financial literacy training, village savings and loan groups and other innovative programs that empower families to generate a stable income and independently support their children.

With generous donor support, 4,922 adoptees and families received support from Holt’s post-adoption services team in 2024 — nearly 1,370 more than in 2023. While this shows greater success in outreach to those needing support, it also underscores the tremendous need for post-adoption services among those touched by adoption. In 2024, we saw an increased need for assistance with citizenship and documentation, in addition to other services such as birth search support, counseling referrals and post-adoption parent education through our PACE program. Over the summer, over 180 campers attended Holt Adoptee Camp in Oregon, Wisconsin and New Jersey — a unique program designed to build adoptee community and help adoptee youth explore their identity alongside campers and counselors who share the unique experience of growing up adopted. After a five-year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we resumed our counselor-in-training program to help recruit more Holt Adoptee Camp counselors. Our post-adoption team also held an adoptee networking event designed to introduce adoptees to each other and local adoptee organizations that hold events, community support groups and education. With more than 50 attendees, this event also gave adoptees the opportunity to access and review their original adoption file with a member of Holt’s post-adoption team — rather than sending them a digital copy. Returning original documents is a great step for adoptees to reclaim and honor their identity and history.

In many countries around the world, an education is not a right. It is a privilege. Children living in poverty do not have access to a free public education system and equal opportunity to achieve their goals. The cost of fees, uniforms and supplies required for school mean that parents may have to choose between feeding their child — or giving them the opportunity to learn and one day, escape the cycle of poverty. Often, children drop out of school to work and help earn income for their family. In some cases, girls as young as 12 or 13 are married off and when they do, their formal education ends. But for over 22,500 children and young adults this past year, you helped them stay on the path to completing their education, leaving a life of poverty, and following their dreams.

Whether you provided monthly support for school fees and supplies as a child sponsor, gave a scholarship through Gifts of Hope or supported our Giving Tuesday campaign to help girls go to school, you helped provide the support and resources needed for 21,356 children to receive an education in 2024! Additionally, donors like you helped 1,211 young adults growing up in poverty or in orphanages to pursue higher education — including through our ILEA program for children aging out of orphanage care in the Philippines. By empowering children through education, you also help protect them from trafficking, abuse, child labor and other dangers that increase exponentially when children are out of school. Thank you for keeping children safe and making their dreams possible in 2024!

In the impoverished communities where you support children, food security continues to be a major concern. Children arrive at school hungry and tired, without lunch, and go home unsure if their family will eat a full meal before bed. But because of you, over 195,000 children received the nourishing food they need to thrive in 2024.

Whether you gave emergency food to a family in crisis, supported a preschool program that provides free lunch or provided a cow, goat or garden for a family to produce their own food, your gifts provided the essential nutrition that children and families need to grow strong and healthy and work toward a better life. In total, Holt sponsors and donors provided a staggering 2,361,064 meals to hungry children and families in 2024.

In 2024, Holt also celebrated 10 years of our Child Nutrition Program, a multifaceted effort that seeks to strengthen nutrition and feeding practices for vulnerable children living in orphanages, foster homes and impoverished communities across the globe. What started as a pilot program in two locations in India has since expanded to eight countries, serving more than 55,000 children.

Holt’s specialized care and support for children with disabilities is one way that our programs are unique from other organizations around the world. Many of the children you support through Holt programs have special healthcare needs or disabilities. In 2024, you helped 2,280 children with disabilities to live fuller, happier lives. In Vietnam, you provided special education and an outreach program in a community where children with disabilities would otherwise stay home all day. In Mongolia, you helped support a program that helps children with disabilities living in impoverished communities to access the specialized resources they need. Through Gifts of Hope, you helped provide adaptive equipment like wheelchairs and hearing aids. And through Holt’s pioneering Child Nutrition Program, you provided the resources to train 15,554 caregivers and parents in how to properly feed children with disabilities so that they are able to receive the full nutrition they need to thrive. 

Through your kind and generous donations in 2024, 3,692 children living in orphanages, group homes, kinship or foster families received the essential food, clothing and medical care they needed, in addition to safe places to live and nurturing care from devoted caregivers.

Holt’s kinship and foster care programs provide more nurturing, family-like care for children who would otherwise live in institutions. Through kinship care, sponsors and donors provide the support children need to live with a family member —  if not a birth parent, then possibly an aunt, uncle or grandparent who can provide loving, attentive care. In many cases, children living in foster care are waiting to rejoin their birth families or join a family through domestic or international adoption. These highly trained and loving foster families provide the one-on-one care, attention, and social and physical development children need to reach critical developmental milestones — and thrive once they join a permanent family.

Whether you helped provide routine health screenings through Holt’s Child Health Days in rural Uganda or a life-changing surgery for a child with a special medical need, your generous donations helped provide vital healthcare for 131,914 children in 2024. As children need caregivers who are healthy and equipped to give them attentive, engaged care, your donations also helped provide medical care for 111,215 parents and family members.

Around the world, children are often sick when they first enter orphanage care. Sometimes this has to do with underlying medical conditions or special needs. Sometimes it has to do with the impoverished conditions they lived in before coming into care. Sometimes it’s because they routinely experienced hunger. Often, it’s a combination of all three. This was true for one 2-year-old girl living in an orphanage in India who donors helped this past year. But thanks to Holt sponsors and donors like you, she received the medical care, nutritious food and therapies she needed to become healthy again.

In 2024, you and your fellow donors gave 5,456 Gifts of Hope to children and families in need around the world. You gave food for hungry children, shoes to keep children’s feet warm, dry and protected on their long walk to school, an egg a day to provide vital protein to growing kids, and livestock likes goats, chickens and cows to nourish families and provide vital income when they sell the offspring. You provided school scholarships for children who might not otherwise go to school, as well as the books and supplies they needed to succeed. You gave the gift of nurturing foster care to children waiting for a permanent, loving family, and urgently needed orphanage supplies like diapers, cribs and blankets. You empowered single mothers to earn income for their family through the gift of job skills training or a small business microgrant. You gave Christmas and birthday gifts to children whose families or caregivers can’t afford to provide gifts on these holidays. And you gave to Holt’s Where Most Needed fund to make it possible for our staff and partners in the field to meet immediate, vital needs of children and families that might otherwise go unmet.

Thank you for your heartfelt gifts to children and families in need in 2024. We can’t wait to partner with you again in 2025!