User:Flex franklin

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DR. HERMANN GMEINER. Dr. Hermann Gmeiner was born into a big family of farmers on the 23rd of June, 1919 in Austria. He was a talented child and won a scholarship to attend grammar school. His mother died while he was still a young boy, and his eldest sister took on the task of caring for the smallest of the children. Having experienced the horrors of war himself as a soldier in Russia, he was then confronted with the isolation and suffering of the many war orphans and homeless children as a child welfare worker after the end of the Second World War. In his conviction, he setup the idea of the SOS Children's Villages in order to help the homeless and orphans grow up in a family just like their own. With just 600 Austrian Schillings which is approximately 40 US dollars in his pocket Hermann Gmeiner established the SOS Children's Village Association in 1949, and in the same year the foundation stone was laid for the first SOS Children's Village in Imst, in the Austrian state of Tyrol. His work with the children and development of the SOS Children's Village organization kept Hermann Gmeiner so busy that he finally decided to discontinue his medical degree course. In the following decades his life was inseparably linked with his commitment to a family-centered child-care concept based on the four pillars of a mother, a house, brothers and sisters, and a village, given his exclusive focus on the need to help abandoned children. He served as Village Director in Imst, organized the construction of further SOS Children's Villages in Austria, and helped to set up SOS Children's Villages in many other countries of Europe. In 1960 SOS-Kinderdorf International was established in Strasbourg as the umbrella organization for SOS Children's Villages with Dr. Hermann Gmeiner as the first president. In the following years the activities of SOS Children's Villages spread beyond Europe. The sensational campaign raised enough funds to permit the first non-European SOS Children's Village to be built in Korea in the year 1963, and SOS Children's Villages on the American and African continents then followed. By 1985 the result of Hermann Gmeiner's work was a total of 233 SOS Children's Villages in 85 countries. In recognition of his services to orphaned and abandoned children he received numerous awards and was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize. SOS Children's Villages is currently active in 132 countries and territories. 438 SOS Children's Villages and 346 SOS Youth Facilities provide more than 60,000 children and youths in need with a new home. More than 131,000 children/youths attend SOS Kindergartens, SOS Hermann Gmeiner Schools and SOS Vocational Training Centres. Around 397,000 people benefit from the services provided by SOS Medical Centres, 115,000 people from services provided by SOS Social Centres. SOS Children's Villages also helps in situations of crisis and disaster through emergency relief programs. Dr. Hermann Gmeiner once said, “Every big thing in the world only comes true when somebody does more than he has to do”. Dr. Hermann Gmeiner died on the 26th of April 1986 in Innsbruck, Austria.