A few weeks ago we asked for your help. We launched the little light project, with a desire to illuminate organizations that are working on behalf of the fatherless in China.
We were thrilled with the response. So many hard-working, orphan-loving organizations that are – day-in and day-out – loving the least of these.
Please spend some time perusing the following list of 19 organizations. You’ll find items for sale that benefit orphans, foster homes, educational programs, media projects and numerous other wonderful (and beautiful) ways to get involved and shine your light this Christmas.
It is our hope that in using our little light to shine on these amazing organizations that you will take the torch and use your little light to bless one or more of these organizations this Christmas. And maybe even year-round.
In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. Matthew 5:16
Ai Can Make a Difference was created after witnessing the difficult conditions her daughter endured in a Xi’an orphanage. This mom turned ai (the Mandarin word for love) into action and now her growing non-profit works to provide orphaned children with a loving home, education and medical care.
They sponsor special needs school tuition for a child, and a caretaker for therapy and special attention. Their vision is to provide vocational training to teens. During annual trips, they bring supplies and help arrange for better care and conditions. 100% of donations goes to serve orphaned children.
Donations to Ai Can Make A Difference can be made here.
Bring Me Hope is dedicated to improving the lives and futures of Chinese orphans. It begins at summer camp and continues with year-round programs to meet the ongoing needs of orphans in China.
“We believe that every person is created with value. It breaks our hearts when that is not recognized and children are rejected, abandoned and abused. Our experiences and histories vary, but one thing binds us: passion for serving needy children and recruiting others to the same cause.”
Sponsor a child to go to a Bring Me Hope camp here.
Build a Menu is an online meal planning site that uses proceeds from its membership fees to support orphan care charities.
Owned by two sisters with five adopted children between them, they sponsor dozens of children around the world as well as donate directly to orphan care charities. Read about the charities they support here.
Butterfly Children’s Hospices is based in Changsha, China. It is the first palliative care service for orphaned and abandoned sick and dying children.
Butterfly Children’s Hospices receives babies and children who have been given a life expectancy of 6 months or less. Amazingly some of our little ones will respond to treatment and go on to live full and happy lives. Others are with us for only a short time. Each story is different, but the need is always pressing.
We have been open since May 2010, and so far have cared for 132 children, aged from 1 day to 14 years old. 71 have received loving end of life care. 16 have had surgery which was previously denied them. 10 have been adopted. Another 6 await adoption. The other children are living happy lives at Butterfly Children’s Hospices or in foster care.
Donate to the work that Butterfly Children’s Hospice is doing here.
Children’s Bridge Foundation provides much needed surgeries for orphaned children in China. Made up of adoptive moms and grandmas, the foundation covers the cost of surgeries for children living in orphanages and foster care in China who have not received the medical help they need.
They also support the Elim centre, which provides care, education and support to HIV positive children.
Read more about their current Kickstarter campaign to fund cleft surgeries.
Connected Hearts Ministry exists to raise awareness for the plight of orphans who are least likely to be adopted. Their goal is to help older children and children with special needs find forever families. They further this mission by providing adoption funding and education to connect these children with families.
We provide education, support and financial assistance for families adopting older children, sibling groups, and children with special needs. Since adoption is for a lifetime, we commit to serving our sponsored families for life as well. We offer support before, during and after their adoption.
We help raise funds for adopting families through our Family Sponsorship Program. This year we have helped raise over $58,000 to help 7 seven families who are adopting children with special needs from China. Five of these children are already home with their forever families, and we are still raising funds to help bring the other two kids home next year.
We are currently working with All God’s Children International to advocate for children with special needs in China. Anyone interested in finding out more about advocating for these children, or anyone interested in potentially adopting one of these children, can email us for more information here.
Connected Hearts can be found on Faceboook here.
Donations can be made here.
Create H.O.P.E. Designs:
H…Hearts United
O…Orphaned No More
P…Patterns With Purpose
E…Even the Least of These
Our goal is to provide beautiful patterns or tutorials for a very affordable price. All of the designs are down-loadable PDF files, ensuring that Create H.O.P.E. will operate overhead-free. 100% of all funds generated will benefit designated foundations serving orphans and their communities.
Visit Create H.O.P.E. at their Design Shop here, and on Etsy here.
First Hugs is an organization founded by adoptive parents whose mission is to help improve the quality of life for the children in the care of XinXiang Social Welfare Institute who have not yet found their forever families and for those who may grow up without forever families. Most, if not all, of these children have special needs.
Read the story of how First Hugs began here.
“We are very small. $30,000 annual budget. All volunteer. 15-18 kids. Just seeing the light and hope in the kids eyes since we started there and moved from an 8 hour a day program to a 24 hour a day program is amazing. Now the kids are going to their forever families knowing love and care.”
Donations can be made to First Hugs here.
Grace and Hope for Children places Chinese orphans in loving foster homes. They sponsor children in 4 provinces and many SWIs, so that they will know the love of a family instead of life in an institution. Since 2005, they have placed over 3,000 children in foster homes.
Sponsor a child or make a general donation to Grace and Hope here.
International China Concern partners with two SWI’s in Hunan and Henan province to bring the most medically fragile and vulnerable children into their care. 
Started in 1993 following the death of an orphaned girl, ICC cares for orphans in the following ways:
– to rescue children
– feed, love and house those children
– find schools
– fund surgeries
– prevent abandonment
– train caregivers
You can donate to ICC to sponsor a child, support a nanny, purchase milk or diapers, provide physical therapy or educational supplies and more. Visit this page to learn more.
Love Without Boundaries exists to transform the lives of orphaned and impoverished children by providing hope and healing.
Read about Arya, a little girl who benefitted from our Medical, Healing Homes, and Foster Care programs. None of this would have been possible without the support of our donors. So often I hear someone say ‘but I can’t really make a difference’ or ‘I can’t donate enough money to save a child’s life’. Statements like these always makes me feel so sad because every single person that makes a donation, no matter how big or small; or tells a friend about a child; or prays for a child is making a difference in that child’s life!
Love Without Boundaries cares for thousands of children in China through the following programs:
Education
Foster Care
Healing Homes
Medical
Nutrition and Special Projects
You can benefit LWB by going to their homepage and clicking on the Amazon link to shop.
You can donate to one of LWB’s programs here.
Morning Star Foundation works with orphaned, abandoned and needy children with severe heart disease in China.
Morning Star Foundation works to care for children with complex congenital heart defects, providing surgeries and care for the children in our foster home, as well as partnering with Chinese families in our LOVE Project, an orphan prevention program.
The LOVE project aims at forming a community of believers who come together to reach out to families parenting children with heart disease who, because of financial limitations, are faced with the terrible choice of abandoning their child in hopes of receiving medical care, or taking their child home knowing they will not survive. The LOVE project requires significant funding, but we would also love if you would partner with us in prayer for the families of these children.
Donations to Morning Star Foundation can be made here.
New Day Foster Home was founded in 2000 with the vision to help provide life-saving care for orphans abandoned because of their special needs. Since its founding New Day has coordinated over 280 surgeries and celebrated 262 adoptions.
New Day consists of a 25-bed facility in Beijing with an additional fifteen children living in local foster families.
New Day South is a 12-bed facility located in Zhongshan, a Southern city.
New Day North in Inner Mongolia began its first project this May and provides care for twelve children in a local orphanage.
New Day posts frequent updates and pictures on their facebook pages for New Day in Beijing, New Day South and New Day North.
You can read stories on New Day’s blog, or follow on twitter (@NDFosterHome) and Instagram (@Newdayfosterhome).
Donations can be made to New Day here.
Orphanage Projects aims to improve the quality of life of children living in children’s homes by creating awareness and providing information, training and guidance tailor-made for each individual children’s home. The approach is to work alongside caregivers and analyze the care system in place and then discuss with management what can be done to improve things. In March ‘Children Everywhere. How to Provide Good Institutional Care to Infants and Toddlers. Book 1: Essential Elements of Childcare in Institutions’ came out.
This is the world’s first institutional childcare manual, written by Orphanage Project founder, Florence Koenderink. The manual gives practical information, in simple English with lots of photos, on how to provide good care in children’s homes.
The manual can be ordered here. It can also be ordered through other major online bookshops. (if ordered through Lulu.com, Orphanage Projects receives the small portion.) The price was set this low to make sure the information reaches those who need it.
Please consider ordering a Manual and sending it to a children’s home or orphanage – it would be a small gesture with a huge impact.
POP’s Foundation is dedicated to serving orphaned children with special needs in China.
Founded in 1994 by Kenneth Yeung, President of Prince of Peace Enterprises, Inc., POP’s Foundation is a non-profit organization that helps abandoned and disabled children by managing and financing the Prince of Peace Children’s Home in Tianjin, and promotes with other organizations that help the adopted children and the needy, in order to develop harmonious societies.
POP – a child’s term for ‘dad’. We would like to refer to the ‘Big POP’ – a God who loves all His children and whom we all can belong. POP’s Foundation was created to bring the love and care of God to orphans and the adoption families. With bilingual abilities, and cultural understanding, we are an organization established to fill many such needs in the United States and aid children in China.
Donate to POP’s Foundation here. Learn more about volunteering at POP’s Foundation here.
Show Hope is a movement to care for orphans, restoring the hope of a family to orphans in distress around the world. Founded by Steven Curtis Chapman and his wife Mary Beth, this nonprofit organization is helping to make a difference for the millions of orphans and waiting children around the world. 
Primarily they do this through Adoption Aid financial grants that help give orphans families and Special Care Centers in China that help orphans with special needs. You can learn more about Show Hope and sponsor a child here.
This Christmas, you can also join Show Hope in giving the “Gift of Hope” to orphans here.
The Archibald Project uses media, such as photography, video, and blogging, to document real examples of orphan care. These creative, firsthand stories will inspire and move you to action. Witness as ordinary people do extraordinary things for orphans. Buy a t-shirt and spend a moment watching their incredible video on Bethel China, a home for visually impaired orphans.
When people see these firsthand stories, they are inspired and moved to action. This happens because we are exposing people to ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things.
Donations to The Archibald Project can be made here.
Three Cord Creations has great gifts for coffee lovers. Each custom coffee pour over stand is created with a heart for the orphans of China. 
Using his God given talents and creativity, the artist provides a wonderful coffee experience with his stands while empowering children who have aged out of being adopted by donating all profits to Shepherds Field Children’s Village Vocational Training Center in Tianjin, China.
You can find Three Cord Creations on Instagram and on Etsy. Visit the Etsy shop to purchase custom coffee stands from an artisan who uses his talent and creativity to provide a unique coffee experience.
Zhanjiang Kids Organization is a nonprofit association celebrating kids adopted from Zhanjiang, Guangdong, China and devoted to helping the children of the Zhanjiang Social Welfare Institute.
Zhanjiang Kids Organization started in 2007 as a parent-led charity in our children’s large SWI. All of our children came home with significant delays and deficits in 2004-2006, and we began praying about how we could change things for the hundreds left behind, and those hundreds still to come.
Doors opened despite a multitude of “no’s” and since that time, we have tried to affect every single demographic there: first, with the infants, next, with the older school-aged children, and most recently, the children with special needs, ages 4-12. The Shining Stars preschool program has been a quick success and the children are thriving in it. This last summer we debuted a summer camp and the SWI director heartily welcomed it back again next year, and for a longer period. These children depend on us, and we are doing our best to keep their confidence.
As we are 100% volunteer, and our overhead is in the 2% region, we depend on the generosity of those who believe in what we’re doing. No gift is ever too small, and our pledge is that every dollar will physically touch the children. Thank you so much for considering us in your year-end giving. You can find us on Facebook here.
Donations to Zhanjiang Kids can be made here.
We hope you have found some ways to involve yourself and your family in orphan care through your shopping and donating this Christmas.
We will have a link to this post accessible year-round on No Hands But Ours, so if you would like your organization (or an organization you love) featured please contact us.
Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas.
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