Keys to success

Though the strengths and needs of homeless and working children vary from country to country, research and experience around Latin America have shown that certain characteristics are common to the most successful organizations. Essays on this site laud several NGOs as “among the best” or “most innovative” of organizations; below, we provide the criteria on which we make this judgement.

The best programs for street and working children

• Support and promote the agency (protagonismo) of children and youth, not just providing services, but encouraging them to be actors in their own lives.
• Understand and address the broad social context of poverty, social exclusion, and family disintegration.
• Reflect on their work systematically and write their ideas in a way that staff and others can learn from these reflections.
• Research the lives of street children and their families. This work requires a strong intellectual foundation.
• Promote the arts, sports, politics, and other activities that inspire children’s passion.
• Dialogue with other programs and with academic institutions in a process of mutual learning.
• The characteristics allow the best NGOs to serve more children more effectively, often at a lower per-child cost. They also provide long term solutions; children that participate in these programs are much less likely to live on the street as adults and are less likely to die on the streets.

SAL research has found that certain characteristics, often thought to be important, do not correlate with success.

• Size and effectiveness are not related. Of the best programs, several have fewer than 5 staff members while others have more than 200.
• Budget is only loosely correlated with success, largely because better salaries and better staff make for better services.
• Organizations that emphasize basic services (shelters, soup kitchens, etc) are the least cost effective and have the least long term impact on children’s lives. In some cases, however, these services are necessary.