Sophia always loved young children. She liked to play with them, make them laugh, take care of them and always felt comfortable and fulfilled around younger kids. She wanted to work with orphans in the future and The Sophia Zaveri Foundation will therefore offer continuous year-round support of food and supplies to an orphanage in Salvador which shelters and educates young children. Depending on donations and ongoing funding, the foundation hopes to build and open a new orphanage.

The foundation supports families in small towns in Bahia who are in extreme poverty. This means they are earning less than R$600 a month, which is approx. US$115, £90 or €105 at today’s exchange rate (April 2020). These are families who are not covered by government aid programmes and never have enough food to eat; the foundation is helping by supplying food and other items for them each month.

We support students from very poor families who, despite going to under-funded, under-equipped state high schools, were smart enough to get into a one of the highly competitive federal universities where they are studying to become doctors or teachers. However, even though education is free in Brazilian federal universities, students often fail or drop out because they can’t even afford the bus fare to university, or they have to stop their studies in order to work to help feed the family or to deal with other life needs and hardships. The foundation covers a significant part of their expenses for the rest of their university studies to make sure that they can complete their degrees and achieve their dream of being a doctor or teacher. Depending on funding, we hope to increase the number of students supported each year.