by Mary Avant

In mid 2004, child services clinical director and mental health counselor Laura Peterson gave up dealing with the symptomatic problems endemic in the US foster care program and decided to tackle causes. That winter she founded Hands to Hearts International, an organization dedicated to changing the plight of orphaned children around the world; an organization dedicated to changing the condition of impoverished women unable to contribute to their families or their communities.

What drove Peterson out of well paying positions within the US child care system into unpaid work developing child care programs in orphanages in southern India? “I was tired of the fact that we reached kids too late,” she says. “And by too late, I mean children at age five who are already bailing out of multiple foster homes and adoptions, and at age five in the US, taken into their first psychiatric institution with serious mental health issues.