The GOD'S CHILD Project

The GOD’S CHILD Project (GCP) is an educational development organization dedicated to "breaking the chains of poverty through education, home building and healthcare." Since its founding in 1991 by Patrick Atkinson, it has grown to more than 12 distinct programs in five different countries.

Today, The GOD’S CHILD Project cares for and educates 5,000 orphaned, abandoned, and poverty-stricken boys and girls in addition to providing health and community-based services for 8,700 widowed, abandoned, and single mothers and their dependents in Guatemala, El Salvador, Malawi, and India.

The GOD’S CHILD Project is dedicated to sustainable and permanent changes. Through clinics, schools, social work, micro-finance, homeless shelters, drug rehabilitation, and human trafficking advocacy, The GOD'S CHILD Project is able to get to the underlying causes of poverty instead of merely treating the symptoms. Children who were once homeless and abandoned are now professional adults with families of their own because of the chance that GOD’S CHILD gave them.

We are not a hand-out program. Children earn much of what they receive through their participation in the program and in their schools, and have the opportunity to earn an additional scholarship which supplements, or even surpasses, their family’s income. Rewarding the children for academic excellence gives the other family members (i.e. the mother or parents) a vested interest in the academic progress of their child.