An Open Door into Your Heart is a lifeline for some of the world’s most vulnerable children.

In Uganda, we rescue abandoned babies and street children who have been left to fend for themselves and face a daily fight for survival. Many arrive in desperate need of medical help which they receive. After getting them back to good health, we strive to find family members they can be resettled with. We also help hundreds of children at our education centres in India. In the UK, we visit hundreds of schools with a vibrant presentation about our work in Uganda and the life-changing Christian faith that motivates everything we do.

We are a registered charity in the UK, as well as registered as a Non Government Organisation (NGO) in both Uganda and India. We are also registered as an Approved Adoption Agency in Uganda (but not in the UK or India).

An Open Door began in 1990, set up by Diane Pardoe and Lynda Ellis from Wales, in the UK. In those early days, our focus was visiting schools across the region, using sketches, songs and music to present the Christian faith in a vibrant and relevant way. Over the next seven years we visited hundreds of schools, with our founders becoming affectionately known to thousands of children and teachers as ‘Auntie Di and Auntie Lynda‘.

It was in 1996 that we made our first connection with Uganda after being invited to join a mission trip to the East African country. During a three-week stay, our school workers did presentations in Ugandan schools and spoke in churches and at mission events.

Witnessing the plight of the street children in Uganda had a major impact on our team who felt compelled to do something to help. Within a year, we had rented a small house on the outskirts of the Ugandan capital Kampala where a dozen boys who had been living on the streets could be cared for. Soon, we opened a second home in the trading town of Malaba on the Kenyan border and today we provide care for a total of 165 children at the two centres .

The new millennium has seen our work extend to new areas of the world. Since 2001, we have supported a project in Rwanda which has planted 40 churches that are meeting people’s spiritual and practical needs. An Open Door also has a base in India, run by Paul Gnarajan who volunteered with us in the UK in 2002. Nine education centres have been set up in and around the city of Madras, attended by around 430 children. We are always seeking to expand our work. Our hope for the future is to provide care, education and hope for children, wherever in the world we are needed.