What it means to be “values led” as an international NGO

Today, on 6 October, SOS Children’s Villages UK became Right to Childhood.

It’s not unusual for a charity to rebrand. What is unusual is that our decision to rebrand wasn’t born out of a crisis of identity but a consolidation of our values.

Until recently, despite being a legally independent entity, SOS Children’s Villages UK had operated within an international federation structure for over 50 years. This is a membership model where independent national organisations unite, through a global secretariat, sharing a common brand, standards and access to services.

For some time, the UK team had been trying to influence change from within, taking part in the federation structure’s governance processes, calling for systemic changes in line with sector best practice and doing everything possible to try and improve outcomes for the children, young people and families supported by the work we fund.

Over time, we also recognised a growing strategic misalignment between the direction of the UK charity and the wider federation model. In a large international federation, achieving consistent alignment around strategy and how values are applied in practice is inherently challenging. Ultimately, this structure was no longer the right one through which to fulfil our charitable purpose.

As an organisation, we are values-led, but this did not mean that the answer on the direction to take was obvious. Our values provided the compass, but we still had to make a difficult ethical judgement about what acting on them required.

For the Board, that meant weighing our responsibilities to children and young people alongside our obligations to partners, staff, supporters and the programmes we fund. We had to consider whether we could continue to influence sufficient change from within, and what the consequences of leaving would be.

Good governance and ethical decision-making helped us determine what our values required of us in practice. We concluded that leaving was the right course for us, despite a clear understanding of the operational, financial and relational challenges it would bring.

The changes we made were developing for years

Internally, we were already heading towards phasing out child sponsorships and moving away from the “villages”-style model associated with SOS Children’s Villages. It was becoming difficult to explain that, despite the “villages” in our name and the ostensible support for this model from some of the peers we shared a name with, our work had developed in a different direction.

We had also begun developing robust positions on care reform, looking at how we fund more long-term and holistic approaches to family separation, and considering what we needed to change about our work as an INGO to be most effective.

Values are relatively easy to articulate when they support the direction an organisation is already travelling. They become more meaningful when following them requires difficult choices, carries organisational cost or means giving something up. Ultimately, our decision to leave the federation meant we had to take a close look at our entire identity, the way we work and how we support the children we exist to serve. After working for years to move away from sponsorships, we were able to fully end our sponsorship offering in July 2026.

Alongside this, we strengthened our due diligence and safeguarding processes and began working with fewer partners in a more comprehensive way. This way, we can build deeper, more locally-led partnerships while maintaining connections, networks and infrastructure.

Our decisions show how quickly INGOs can act to create change

Nine months ago, Right to Childhood did not exist. Our decision to reshape the way we work came from an urgent need to make the way we work better.

Many of us are grappling with how we can make INGOs more effective. We have all seen the slow pace of change within the sector. There are moments when the risks of continued delay need to be weighed just as seriously as the risks of acting.

What we learned is that values can accelerate rather than constrain decision making. Once we were clear about the principles against which choices should be tested, we were able to make some difficult decisions at considerable pace and clearly articulate them to the organisation and our partners.

As we launch under our new identity as Right to Childhood, we have articulated a whole new set of values for us to follow. They reflect what we believe will serve us best for whatever comes next. We think it’s important for us as an INGO to be practical, but also purposeful and unafraid to speak up. Most importantly, we know that being child-focused is the absolute pinnacle of why we, as Right to Childhood, exist.

Our work is entering a new era, and we will continue to question how we can best serve the millions of children who are separated every year from their families due to poverty, death and disasters. Leaving the federation did not initiate all these changes. Many were already underway. What it did was give us the opportunity to ask whether every aspect of the organisation was now aligned with our purpose and values.

We won’t get everything right straight away. Being values-led does not mean believing that we always have the right answer. In fact, it should require the opposite: being prepared to question ourselves, listen, be accountable when we get things wrong and change course when the evidence tells us we should.

What our experience has taught us is that values cannot simply be words an organisation publishes. They must influence the decisions we make, the partnerships we build, how power and resources are shared and what we are prepared to walk away from.

For INGOs, perhaps that is the real test: not what we say our values are, but what we are prepared to do – and sometimes give up – to live by them.