Worldwide Orphans Foundation (WWO) was founded in 1997 by Dr. Jane Aronson, a renowned pediatric infectious disease and adoption specialist who dedicated her life to working with children.  

From the beginning, WWO’s mission has been to enrich the lives of vulnerable children by improving the physical, emotional, social and cognitive well-being of orphaned children throughout the world.  WWO’s scope of work continues to change and adapt as the face of childhood vulnerability evolves in each country. There also continues to be advances in the science of early brain development, increased research on the effects of adverse childhood experience on a child’s development and myriad lessons learned from our team’s decades of experience. 

By 2011, WWO consolidated its efforts under one innovative program design called Element of Play®. This model addresses gaps in our prior understanding of how children think and feel and overcomes barriers to quality early intervention services. This approach, based on a science-based theory of development, supports more than the immediate needs of children, it also addresses the strengths and challenges facing children within their families, communities and society.

Today, our program strength lies in this innovative play methodology and its ability to reduce developmental delays in the children that we serve. We are focusing on expanding our Element of Play® training sessions and increasing our network of collaborative partners. We will continue to monitor the affect our work has on deepening the bonds between caregivers and children, while we work to mitigate adverse childhood experiences. Our goal is to increase the number of children we reach with our therapeutic play while we work towards implementing widely our skills development program for out of school youth, and unemployed adults.

Over the past 26 years, we have changed the lives of more than 200,000 children, families and communities, and worked in a total of nineteen countries. Today our beneficiaries live in Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Haiti, USA, Ukraine, and Vietnam. May our work over the next 26 years, continue to be responsive, innovative and impactful as we all work towards eliminating developmental delays in young children worldwide.