History
The first "Children's Home" was founded in 1868 by Methodist minister Thomas Bowman Stephenson who had be moved by the fate of street children in London. The first home was a renovated a stable in Church Street, Waterloo. The first two boys were admitted in 9 July 1869. In 1871 the home was moved to Bonner Road, Lambeth, and girls were admitted. The home approved by the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in the same year. A year later, in 1872, a second home was opened in Edgworth, Lancashire. An emigration scheme was set up in 1873 and a branch in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada opened.
The homes were dividend into small family units run by a "house mother" and "house father" which was in marked contrast to the large institutions and workhouses common at the time. Training was also an important aspect, a childcare course was set up in 1878 and the graduates of this program called the "the Sisterhood" or "the Sisters of the children" went onto work in the Children's Home.
An Industrial School at Milton, Gravesend is taken over in 1875 and a children's refuge in Ramsey on the Isle of Man is taken over in 1882. With the opening of the Princess Alice Orphanage opens in Birmingham the Home is renamed to " Children's Home and Orphanage".
Further properties in Alverstoke, Hampshire, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, Frodsham in Cheshire, Bramhope, near Leeds are acquired and by 1908, the charity had grown to become the "National Children's Home and Orphanage".
In 1913 the work began on a large site in Harpenden which was home to over 200 children and had a print works for apprentices. It became the Head Office.
Many other new branches and schools were founded, including the first residential nursey branch in Sutton Coldfield, in 1929. and the First Scottish branch open in Glasgow in 1955.
It become an adoption agency in 1926 and expanding to work outside the UK in 1969, supporting children's social care development in southern Africa, the Caribbean and Central America.
The charity changed its name to "NCH Action for Children " in 1994 and "Action for Children" in September 2008. The name change reflects a shift away from providing children's homes, most of which have now closed, to a wider range of services.
Read more about this topic: Action For Children
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)