About SOS Children’s Village Founder

Our Founder

SOS-Kinderdorf International was founded by Austrian philanthropist Herman Gmeiner in Imst Austria in 1949.

He was committed to helping children in need-children who had lost their homes, security, and families due to the Second World War. With the support of many donors and co-workers, SOS Children's Villages has grown to help children globally. From the first Children's Village in Imst, Austria, our presence is now in over 136 countries and territories.

"What the orphaned and abandoned child needs first and foremost is a family; a family in which he or she can develop normally" Dr Herman Gmeiner (1919-1986) Founder, SOS Children's Villages.

In his conviction that help can never be effective as long as the children have to grow up without a home of their own, he set about implementing his idea for SOS Children's Villages. With just 600 Austrian schillings (approx. 40 USD) in his pocket, Hermann Gmeiner established the SOS Children's Village Association in 1949, and in the same year, the foundation stone was laid for the first SOS Children's Village in Imst, in the Austrian state of Tyrol. His work with the children and the development of the SOS Children's Village organization kept Hermann Gmeiner so busy, that he finally decided to discontinue his medical degree course.

In the following decades, his life was inseparably linked with his commitment to a family-centred child-care concept based on the four pillars of a mother, a house, brothers and sisters, and a village. Given his exclusive focus on the need to help abandoned children, the rest of his biography reads like the history of SOS Children's Villages with itself. He served as Village Director in Imst, organized the construction of other SOS Children's Villages in Austria, and helped to set up SOS Children's Villages in many other European countries.

In 1960 SOS-Kinderdorf International was established in Strasbourg as the umbrella organization for SOS Children's Villages, with Hermann Gmeiner as the first president. In the following years, the activities of SOS Children's Villages spread beyond Europe. The sensational "grain of rice" campaign raised enough funds to permit the first non-European SOS Children's Village to be built in Daegu, Korea, in 1963, and SOS Children's Villages on the American and African continents followed. By 1985 the result of Hermann Gmeiner's work was a total of 233 SOS Children's Villages in 85 countries. In recognition of his services to orphaned and abandoned children, he received numerous awards and was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, he was always at pains to stress that it was only thanks to the support of millions of people that it had been possible to achieve the goal of providing abandoned children with a permanent home, and that still applies today.

Hermann Gmeiner died in Innsbruck in 1986 and is buried at SOS Children's Village Imst.