132 years of love and caring

Every one of these kids has been subjected to abuse, emotional or physical.

- Ian Hughes

I t has been 132 years of caring and still counting. That is the humbling and uplifting history of the Johannesburg Children's Founded in 1892 by a leading doctor's wife, Lucy Matthews, it was initially a tiny two-roomed creche in Fordsburg to enable working mothers to seek employment knowing their children would be safe and cared for.

Matthews soon realised that there was a much broader and deeper need and she became the main driving force in transforming the creche into a permanent, properly constituted children's home.

It cared, on a strictly nondenominational basis, for any child who had been deprived of proper parental care.

In the early years, the home occupied several addresses.

Fordsburg first, then Doornfontein and even relocated to Verulam in KwaZulu-Natal during the Boer War with 29 children.

When that conflict ended the children were returned to Joburg and the decision was made to build a permanent home and 10 acres were bought in what was then the country suburb of Observatory.

Today the home is a residential facility providing high quality care for 64 children from the ages of three up to, in occasional instances, 22.