Who we are What we do What we do Giving Kids a Life of Choice It doesn’t matter how you’re involved in Hands we want you to benefit and feel enriched by the experience. When we consider the community of Hands there are a couple of obvious groups: those that support the work that we do; and those in Thailand that are the direct beneficiaries of that support. For those in Thailand, the kids and communities whose lives are positively changed each and every day, we measure the impact of our work not on the number of kids, not on the number of homes and not on the amount of money we raise. They can certainly be tangible measures, but the one metric we value most is the choices the kids have when it's time to leave their home. Our mission is to create a life of choice for our kids, rather than one of chance. We do this by investing in their futures because we know that if you want long term results you need to make long term commitments. The Hands community, that works hard to generate the funds necessary to enable us to create a life of choice, often benefit more than they could ever imagine by supporting someone else. This often comes in the form of their participation in one of our incredibly popular shared experiences. At Hands we work on the principle that supporting charity, as an individual or as a business should be good for you, not just those receiving the money. Personally benefiting from your involvement in charity is not just a good thing it’s so often necessary for that long term involvement. The money that is raised and entrusted with Hands to bring about change is used to provide the life saving necessities for the kids in our homes and importantly it supports many families in an outreach program keeping kids out of our homes. We know the best place for kids when all things are equal is in a family. When that doesn’t exist we provide a home for those kids, which really is just one big family. The kids who live with us might do so for a short or long time and they are with us usually because of one of three situations exist: They have no known family to care for them; They may have a parent, grandparent or other family member who is known to them, but for a variety of reasons are unable to care for them; and The kids may have been living with a parent or family member but for their safety they have been removed from that situation by the police or government officials and placed into our care. 100% of Donations to the Kids Apart from our life changing shared experiences, what we often hear from our supporters is that they love our transparency and the fact that 100% of all donations go directly to the kids and communities that we support and not one cent of their hard earned donations are spent on administration or fundraising. They love the fact our annual audited accounts are posted on our website that demonstrates that we do what we say we do. At Hands we don’t profess that how we operate the charity is the best or desired way, it’s just the way that works for us and our donors like it. The question often raised and filled with a degree of scepticism, when someone hears the fact that 100% of all donations goes to the kids and communities is “how can you do that?” A good and reasonable question. The establishment of Hands Group, future proofed the position of the charity - Hands Across the Water. 100% of donors money will always be used to enrich the lives of the kids and communities we support in Thailand. In 2011, as we continued to grow we knew that to provide more resources for the kids and communities we couldn’t reach our potential just with a board of volunteers, we knew there would come a time that we would need to employ a dedicated team in Australia to help us achieve more. But we also didn’t wanted to spend donors money on salaries. To give us the best of both we established a private company that would sit next to the charity, operating as a social enterprise to generate its own funds through commercial activities. The mandate for this company, known as Hands Group, was to generate income totally seperate to donations that would cover the fundraising and administration costs of the charity. It’s what we believe is the right thing and what we hear from our donors they love about us. Our Kids have Dreams