INTERVIEW
Sam Peach
THE INVESTOR
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21
I
magine growing up in a world without
love, without anyone who cares for
you. Mark and Caroline Cook,
founders of the charity Hope and
Homes for Children, are working to
ensure that millions of children around the
world do not face that grim future.
The couple are leading proponents of a
process called‘deinstitutionalisation’ – the
transformation of outdated childcare services
to ensure children can grow up within a
loving, supportive and supported family,
instead of an institution.Yet their mission
to help abandoned and orphaned children
started very differently.
Mark was a commander of the UN
Protection Force in the formerYugoslavia in
1992 when he discovered an orphanage in
Croatia that had been destroyed by shelling
and gunfire. Mark made what he describes
now as a rash promise: to put things right
for them.Aged 50, he left the army, raised
£1million and,working through another charity,
rebuilt the orphanage. On his way back to
the UK he read a book,
Natasha’s Story
, by the
war correspondent Michael Nicholson, about
a little girl he had rescued from an orphanage
in Sarajevo and later adopted.The story
started with the line:‘This book is dedicated
to Natasha and all those she left behind.’
‘I woke up in the middle of the night
and just knew I had to go to Sarajevo to find
out what had happened to the rest of the
children,’ says Mark.
You either had to be in the armed forces,
a journalist or working in a humanitarian role
to gain entry to the under-siege Sarajevo, so
Nicholson arranged for Mark and Caroline to
be accredited as ITN correspondents.They
spent several days at the orphanage.
‘The 60 or so remaining children were
living like feral animals,’ says Mark.‘There
were a few adults with them, and they had a
little food – porridge and potatoes – but there
was no running water or power. No schooling.
We told the children we were going to rebuild
the place, but they didn’t believe us.We
wanted to give them hope to cling on to.’
On returning to Britain, the couple decided
to set up their own charity to help orphans of
war and disaster.The charity’s early work
concentrated on the restoration of institutions,
Find out more
For further information on the
work of Hope and Homes for Children, go to
. More information about
the St. James’s Place Foundation can be found at
and providing equipment and volunteers to
work in them and train existing staff.
‘At that stage we still thought that orphans
should be in orphanages,’ says Mark.‘But we
discovered that only about 10% of children in
orphanages are actually orphans.’
Hope and Homes for Children began
helping to reintegrate some children with
their families. Many children are abandoned
because their parents are living in extreme
poverty and simply cannot cope with
another baby to feed and clothe. But with
the right support, those families can keep
their children.
‘A small amount of money can make a huge
difference if it is used carefully,’ says Mark.
The outlook for children who spend time
in institutions around the world is grim.
Mark began asking children what they actually
wanted.‘The answer was always the same:
“Please, please find me a family. I want a
home.” I asked one little boy in the Sudan what
a family meant to him, and he said:“Love.”’
That was a defining moment for the Cooks.
‘We realised that taking a few children out
of orphanages wasn’t going to solve the
problem.We needed to stop children going
into orphanages in the first place,’ says Mark.
Deinstitutionalisation involves developing
a range of family-based services to match the
needs of the children in the institution.These
include social workers, mother and baby units
to provide care and enable parents to bond
with their babies in the early days, day-care
centres to enable mothers to leave their
children somewhere safe while they go out to
work for the day, and skills training so parents
can earn money.The charity also provides
vital training for local professionals so they can
take over responsibility for the new system.
No orphanage can be closed until the
needs of every single child housed within
it are met. But it is delicate and sensitive
work persuading a government that simply
providing food and shelter for abandoned
children is not enough.The charity
concentrates on countries where there is
political will to change the system.
The first breakthrough came in Romania.
After the overthrow of President Nicolae
Ceausescu in 1989, rooms packed with
keening, disabled and starving children
dressed in rags and chained to the bars of
overcrowded cots were discovered.The
pictures shocked the world and lorries full
of aid crossed Europe to help improve the
lot of Romanian orphans.
But the institutions remained cheerless,
grim places. Mark describes watching a
woman cleaning in one orphanage:‘She was
wearing a dirty white coat and the whole
room was grey.The children were grey,
their clothes were grey, the walls were grey.
The only thing with any colour was the
woman’s duster. She put it down to attend
to something else and I saw the hand of a
small child creep through the bars of a cot to
pick it up.The child just gazed in wonder at
this multicoloured duster until the woman
snatched it back.’
Hope and Homes for Children works
closely with the Romanian government in
reforming its childcare system. Mark says:
‘When we began work in Romania in 1999
there were 100,000 children in institutions.
Today the figure is around 9,000 and the
government is committed to working with us
to close every state-run institution by 2020.’
Mark says St. James’s Place, its Partners
and employees have been pivotal to the
growth and development of Hope and Homes
for Children, and have played an instrumental
role in helping improve the lives of hundreds
of thousands of children. St. James’s Place
Partners and employees have raised more
than £5 million to fund the charity’s work
through the St. James’s Place Foundation.
We realised that
taking a few children
out of orphanages
wasn’t going to solve
the problem
