| Street Angels |
| 4th Floor, 343 Railway St. |
| Vancouver, BC |
| V6A 1A4, Canada |
| Tel: 604.224.2217 |
| Fax: 604.681.1292 |
| info@streetangels.ca |
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Background | Board of Directors | Advisory Council
In 1988, three ordinary people - Miriam Ulrych, a Canadian social worker on holiday in Brazil, Luiz Barbosa, a local cab driver, and Josefa Santos, a domestic worker - joined together and committed themselves to keeping as many children as they could off the streets of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. From these early seeds has grown an amazingly efficient grassroots network spanning Brazil, Canada and the UK.
We have concentrated our efforts in and around the community of Dona Aurora, a shantytown on the outskirts of Salvador. When Street Angels began working with this community, the 2,000 mostly illiterate and unemployed residents were living in crowded shack housing with no clean drinking water, sewage system, garbage collection, electricity, meeting place, clinic, school or legal foothold in mainstream society. Thanks to the incredible hard work and perseverance of our Brazilian project leaders and hundreds of dedicated Canadian volunteers, we have achieved amazing successes on a shoestring:
- Clean water, electricity and garbage collection services
- Improved living conditions through the construction and renovation of housing
- Constructed a modern elementary school
- Subsidized primary education through a unique Fostering Education Program
- Built, equipped and maintain a community health centre providing free front-line care to over 1,500 women and children annually
- Constructed, equipped and operate a one-chair dental clinic
- Facilitated the development of self-help and community development groups
- Constructed a training centre and organized dozens of skill-building and small business initiatives to help generate alternatives to child labour
- Increased public awareness about the exploitation, abuse and murder of children who are forced by poverty to live and work in the streets
- Helped strengthen the community's capacity to defend their basic human rights
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