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our philosophy.

Street Kids International believes that street-involved youth have the potential to transform their own lives when given non-judgmental support to develop skills, make choices, and access opportunities.

With our partners, we engage kids on their turf, empower them to explore opportunities to meet their basic needs and realize their potential, and foster a positive shift in the way they’re regarded by their communities.

Our Operating Principles: Cultivating Sustained Growth through Local Innovation

Five operating principles that drive the realization of our vision and guide our mission

1. Open source code: We actively “give away” our methods and materials and look to our partners to demonstrate creativity and innovation by improving them and developing new applications for their use.
2. Initiative-driven partnerships: Our partners “choose us” by being healthy skeptics and by adapting our methods and materials to meet their local needs. Consequently, our partnerships are strengthened and have sustained mutual impact.
3. Multi–sector engagement: We support and engage individuals and organizations from government, non-government, and private sectors to enable local innovation to be converted into genuine policy change that has a significant and sustained impact on the lives of street kids.
4. Partner networks:  Our strategy of sharing effective practices between regions creates networks of our partners across the globe that stimulates learning, leads to the ongoing enrichment of our methods and materials, and grows our impact.
5. Growth oriented: Our exponential growth is driven by the capacity of our local partners to train a growing number of individuals and their institutions to deliver direct programming to street kids, resulting in sustained impact and declining costs over time.