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What are our key values?

First and foremost, it is about helping the children. Paying tuition fees, providing after school care, and enriching and educational activities for the children to help them grow and flourish.

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The second principle of Toe to Heart is that everyone can help. Some people can provide material assistance in the form of money or goods, while others can offer immaterial help, such as their time and attention. By creating a network of material and immaterial support around a child or a few children from a family, we can help those children and the family. This network around a child does not have to be restricted to people living close by: in the past, many visitors from abroad became donors of individual children, enlisted to become a board member or volunteered to help Toe to Heart in a different way, and as such they became part of the Toe to Heart community.

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Our third principle is reciprocity: a project needs to be rooted in the local community it serves, and this community must also support the project either materially or with their time and attention.

What is our dream?

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The dream is for the Toe to Heart concept to grow, and to be applied in multiple cultures and countries.

In India, we want to continue but shift our focus to rural areas or outskirts instead of the city. Starting in 2024, we want start an "outreach project" in the more rural areas in the outskirts of towns.

At the same time, we wish to further explore international opportunities to either work together with existing initiatives in other countries or expand into other countries and cultures. In this way, we would like to create a network of like-minded organisations and aim to work together and learn from each other

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The social problem that Toe to Heart focuses on 

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There is a large gap between the rich and the poor for various reasons. The main way out of the “poverty trap” is through education. Unfortunately, in some cases, education is the first thing that single parent households often have to save on, dooming the children to not receive education and to remain poor.

In parallel, the single parent from these disadvantaged families faces the dilemma to choose between either staying home to care for the children but not being able to wark and receive an income, or letting the children fend for themselves or in charge of the oldest sibling and going out to earn a living.

By providing tuition and after school care, Toe to Heart aims to address this problem in its own way. This is an urgent problem, because the gap is growing worldwide, and every child, especially girls (who yield the most significant results), that receives help can contribute to reducing poverty, not only for themselves but also for future generations. We recognise that our work is currently like a drop in the ocean, but we hope that our approach to aid will spread, and "everyone" will be willing to contribute to solving these problems in a 'Toe to Heart World' 

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The Toe to Heart solution

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For 20 years, we have run a project providing after school care and tuition costs for children in a suburb of Bangalore in India. The "Toe to Heart" concept is to provide small material and immaterial assistance in a reciprocal relationship.

Our solution has been running in Bangalore, and as the children are growing up and the neighbourhood is becoming richer, this will stop after 2028.

We now want to explore if we can apply the concept in a different areas of the city where there is a need and if we find people who want to take this up. In addition, we would now want to create a reach-out project in the outskirts of the city or in the countryside. Next to that we want apply it also outside India and in this way create a broader 'Toe to Heart World' 

As far as we can tell the project is unique, because, even though it has been relying  on donors from (mainly) The Netherlands, we managed to root the project into the local community and find local donors and volunteers as well.