Salaam Baalak Trust<\/a>, an Indian NGO, was set up in 1988 after the success of Mira Nair's film Salaam Bombay<\/em>.<\/a>   It started with a contact point at New Delhi station with 3 members of staff and about 20 children.  More than 25 years on, social workers at the same contact point meet about 1,000 new children a year within hours or days of their arriving at the station.  SBT has grown steadily in response to overwhelming need and now has 6 shelter homes (4 for boys and 2 for girls) and a mobile school that visits slum areas.  It runs programs in education, healthcare, mental health, sports and the arts.  From an initial focus on runaway children, they now also work with families living on the street, and in total, their staff reach out to about 6,000 children a year.  <\/p>\n

At Hope For Street Children, we have long been inspired by Salaam Baalak Trust\u2019s approach and their work. The belief that all children need not only food, clothing and a place to sleep, but that they need the freedom to be children, is their underlying tenet. The founders of Hope For Street Children have all individually had long relationships with the organization and came together to form HFSC in the U.S. with the hope of finding ways to give street children around the world their childhoods back.<\/p>\n\n\n