EVERY May 15, the world celebrates an institution many take for granted, family. The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the International Day of Families in 1993 to spotlight the social, economic and demographic forces reshaping family life. The 2026 theme, Families, Inequalities and Child Wellbeing, asks a difficult question: what happens to a child or a member of the family when they are driven away or just left behind. Across India, NGOs answer that question every day by stepping in where families cannot. Here are five organisations on give.do doing exactly that.
Prarthana Foundation Irlewadi: A home for the children left behind
In rural Solapur, Maharashtra, Prasad Mohite founded Prarthana Foundation Irlewadi to take in the children no one else would. The NGO runs Prarthana Balagram, a residential project for orphans, the homeless, migrant children, and most movingly, the children of farmers who have died by suicide, a generation of kids whose families collapsed under the weight of agrarian debt.
Today, Prarthana Foundation cares for over 300 helpless children in Solapur, providing them with food, shelter, education and the simple dignity of being seen. The Foundation is also building a permanent residential facility planned for 100+ orphaned children and 50+ senior citizens. In a year when the UN is asking the world to look at how inequality breaks families, Prasad Mohite has been quietly rebuilding them, one child at a time. And this International Day of Families, we salute Mohite.
Donate to Prarthana Foundation Irlewadi
Divya Jyothi Charitable Trust: A blind teacher lighting the way for blind girls
Shivaprakash lost his sight as a child in rural Karnataka. He fought through a world without Braille textbooks, mobility training, or specialised teachers, and went on to complete an MA in Political Science. In 2010 he founded Divya Jyothi Charitable Trust in Mysore to make sure no other visually impaired girl had to fight that fight alone.
The Trust runs a Braille transcription centre, a computer training centre, and a residential hostel for college-going visually impaired girls, most of them from below-poverty-line families. Since its inception, Divya Jyothi has educated over 1,000 girls, 200 of them are now in government jobs, 300 in corporate roles. For families who could not provide for a disabled daughter, Shivaprakash has built the family these girls deserved. He is a deserving changemaker to celebrate on this International Day of Families.
Donate to Divya Jyothi Charitable Trust
Maitri: Bringing the abandoned mothers of Vrindavan home
Maitri was founded in 2005 by Winnie Singh along with Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Bhopinder Singh, originally to spread health awareness among India’s uniformed services. Then in 2008, in Vrindavan, Winnie saw something she could not unsee: elderly widows in worn white sarees, abandoned by their own children and sons, sleeping in cowsheds and begging for a handful of rice in one of India’s holiest towns.
That moment became Project Jeevan. Today, Maitri runs ashrams in Vrindavan and Mathura that shelter and care for over 400 widow mothers, giving them two nutritious meals a day, healthcare, companionship and a family they can call their own again. Winnie Singh’s work is a direct answer to this year’s International Day of Families,: when inequality strips women of their place in their families, somebody has to build a new one, and Winnie Singh does just that.
Jeevan Anand Sanstha: The son hundreds of abandoned elders never had
In 2013, a young Sandip Parab found an elderly man lying unconscious near a railway station in Mumbai. He cleaned him, bathed him and took him in, only to discover he had been a school principal whose own son, a professor, had left him there. Sandip never recovered from that encounter. He founded Jeevan Anand Sanstha that year to do for other abandoned elders what no one had done for that man.
A decade on, the NGO has rescued and rehabilitated over 3,000 senior citizens from the streets of Mumbai and Palghar, with more than 230 currently in its care. Sandip and his team bathe, feed, clothe and treat them like their own parents. Inequality and family breakdown in old age is brutal in India. Sandip has made himself the family they were denied.
Donate to Jeevan Anand Sanstha
Sharanalayam: Thaiamma’s “abode of love” in Coimbatore
In January 2001, college professor Vanitha Rengaraj quit her secure teaching job and started a shelter for seven street children in a rented building near Pollachi, Coimbatore. Her father formed a trust and gifted the starting capital. Twenty-five years on, that small home has become Sharanalayam, the “Abode of Love”, and Vanitha is known simply as Thaiamma , mother.
Sharanalayam today shelters more than 150 residents at any given time and has transformed over 3,000 lives. It takes in abandoned children of beggars and sex workers, HIV-positive children, orphaned infants, and mentally challenged women and adults. The NGO runs the only government-licensed adoption agency in its district, a learning centre for autism, and dedicated homes for children and women with mental disabilities. For families that society itself disowned, Thaiamma built one from scratch.
Palawi: The home Mangaltai built for the children no one would touch
In March 2001, while doing HIV/AIDS awareness work among sex workers in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, Mangal Shah, known as Mangaltai, was told about two little girls, barely months old, abandoned in a cowshed. Their parents had died of AIDS. The girls were HIV-positive. Relatives had left them to die. No hospital would admit them. No NGO would take them. Mangaltai took them home herself. That decision became Palawi.
Today, at 69, Mangaltai, her daughter Dimple and their team care for 125 HIV-positive orphaned children aged 4 to 21 at Palawi’s home in Takli village near Pandharpur. When local schools refused to admit her children, she built her own school. In 24 years of operation, the project has reported zero mortality, an almost unbelievable achievement in paediatric HIV care, and the clearest possible answer to on International Day of Families is asking what happens to children when families and society fail them.
Family is where well-being begins
The UN’s 2026 theme for International Day of Families reminds us that a child’s life chances are shaped long before they ever set foot in a school or a hospital, they are shaped by the family they are born into, and the inequalities that family has to absorb. When that family cannot hold, somebody has to. Each of these six NGOs on give.do has built a family in the places where the original one broke down. Your donation this International Day of Families helps them keep doing it. All contributions are 80G tax-deductible.
Choosing to tread the proverbial road less travelled, Ramon embarked upon a career in journalism and spent over 8 years working for various media organisations. A deeper calling to create a sustainable impact in the lives of the less fortunate compelled him to join the social sector. Ramon is a minimalist at heart and an explorer in spirit.
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