Update on AFIRM India

Westgate Healthcare's chosen charity for philanthropy this year is AFIRM India, a charity founded and run by our administrator at Burford House, Gill. So far we are doing well with raising funds for AFIRM and have held a virtual bike ride event with many more fundraising ideas in the pipeline – watch this space!

AFIRM is a UK Registered Charity founded by Gill and her late husband 17 years ago.  After a visit to India, the couple were moved and decided to support orphans and widows and have been helping local communities ever since. AFIRM have built and run an orphanage in Bangalore that provides housing, schooling, food, clothes and medical treatment to 17 girls. They also provide food parcels to the elderly and widows whenever possible.

They have recently purchased 1.8 acres of land in a place called the Kolar Gold Fields – the vision is to eventually re-locate the current home to the land. They plan to build small homes that will house 3 or 4 girls and then bring in a widow off the streets to act as a house mother, the benefit of this is twofold in that it gives the widow a home and a purpose and gives the children a sense of being part of a  family. They also plan to build a large community centre in order to bring in poor, elderly members of the community to feed, clothe, and provide medical treatment once or twice per week. The land will also allow them to grow their own crops and have a Silk Worm Farm on the land.

AFIRM are a very small charity and all of the accounts, paperwork, website etc. is done by Gill who takes no funds from the charity for administration thereby enabling all funds raised to go straight to the source. Every penny raised is really important.

We are very proud to support AFIRM and will continue to do so. If you would like to find out more please visit https://www.afirm-india.org/