Seventy three years ago, Dorothy Reece, a nurse, found an abandoned baby on the doorstep of her home in Mayfair, Johannesburg. She decided to take this baby into her own home and this single act of compassion led to the creation of Cotlands, which over the years has grown into a national organisation caring for more than 3 700 children and their caregivers every month.

Today Cotlands offers a variety of residential and community-based programmes to meet the needs of vulnerable children. These programmes include paediatric hospices, places of safety, Home Based Care projects, nutrition and early childhood development centres. Because all these projects offer holistic care to children, each project has several components, including medical, physical, psychosocial, educational and emotional care, as well as antiretroviral treatment (ART) programmes.

As each new component was added to our spectrum of programmes, we began to realise that for these interventions to be sustainable, training and support also had to be offered to the primary caregivers. Cotlands' ultimate goal is to equip families to care for their children at home and to achieve this, we must ensure that these families have the appropriate skills and sufficient resources. We have therefore continued to add more components to the services on offer - elements like support groups, income-generating projects, food gardens, counselling, material aid, accessing of social grants and orphan care.

The result of these efforts has led us to the definition of our current mission: to provide exceptional models of care to children and their families, by empowering them to improve their quality of life through specialised interventions and sustainability projects.

This trans-disciplinary, multifaceted approach demonstrates its effectiveness daily. Families that are floundering, children who are terminally ill, babies who have been abandoned - are all dealt with in a caring and professional manner that swiftly addresses their needs. The results prove that we really are making a difference.