12 Ways You Made a Difference in 2025

See the powerful difference you made in the lives of vulnerable children and families through Holt programs around the world in 2025!

This past year, your compassion and generosity reached over one million children, families and individuals around the world.

Sometimes a number like one million can be hard to wrap your mind around.

That’s about one person reached every 30 seconds, every day, for a full year.

All because of you.

In 2025, you helped make lifesaving surgeries possible for children with special medical needs. You ensured that hungry children had food every day, keeping them fed, loved and growing.

In the fall, you helped children attend school — protecting them from child trafficking, early marriage and other dangers. When winter came, you provided safe shelter and warm clothing, so no child was left suffering from the cold.

After flooding displaced families from their homes, you provided emergency relief so they could rebuild their lives. And you gave countless Gifts of Hope — from goats to garden supplies — to empower families to rise above poverty and see their children grow and thrive.

This is just a glimpse of the hope and opportunity you’ve made possible. Here are some highlights showing how your support changed lives in 2025:

This past year, you provided direct care and services to 531,859 children — more than half a million young lives touched through education, medical care, nutrition support, disaster relief and more.

Your kindness delivered emergency food to children facing hunger, protected families with safe housing and helped students stay in school through life‑changing scholarships. It ensured children with special needs received critical medical care and made it possible for children to be reunited with their families — or welcomed into loving homes through adoption.

Step into a migrant camp in India and see how your gift of emergency food brought hope!

You stepped up in an extraordinary way in 2025 — providing 2,322,066 meals to hungry children and families. Through Food Every Day, Holt’s new community of monthly donors, children are receiving the consistent, nourishing meals they need to grow, learn and dream.

Around the world, lives are changing because of your generosity. From school lunches to emergency food deliveries, children are growing stronger every day — children like Bilguun, a young boy in Mongolia who now receives nutritious breakfast, lunch and snacks through a Holt‑supported kindergarten every day!

Watch this short video to see the powerful impact you’re making through Food Every Day.

The year 2025 was a year of nutrition breakthrough! While malnutrition and hunger-related diseases remain the leading cause of death for children under age 5 in the developing world, your support made a lifesaving impact in 2025. Because of you, 320,140 children received essential nutritional support to improve their health and overall wellbeing.

Across the globe, Holt teams worked closely with children, caregivers and staff — providing vital nutrition services and feeding education. Because of your generosity, Holt’s nutrition and health team helped address malnutrition, limited access to clean water, and poor hygiene and nutrient deficiencies, laying the foundation for healthier futures.

Holt’s Child Nutrition Program began as a pilot program in India and has now expanded to nine countries, most recently reaching Cambodia! Through a new partnership with the organization Plants-Earth-Life, Holt launched the Child Nutrition Program in Cambodia in 2025 — transforming nutrition and feeding practices for children living in orphanages and giving them a stronger start in life.

See how this new program in Cambodia is helping children grow up healthy and strong!

When families couldn’t wait any longer, your gift to the Molly Holt Fund arrived at exactly the right time. From providing medical care for three children with heart conditions in Thailand to helping a young girl in China recover from a lifesaving liver transplant, your generosity ensured that 255,944 children and families received the critical medical care they needed in 2025.

For many families living in poverty, access to health care remains out of reach — whether for emergency surgeries or routine checkups and vaccinations. The medical care you made possible in 2025 removed those barriers, ensuring that nothing stood in the way of a child’s health and wellbeing.

Because of you, children are living longer, healthier and fuller lives. Take a moment to explore this photo album and see the children whose lives have been transformed through the Molly Holt Fund for Children with Special Needs.

This past year, you helped children chase their dreams. You provided the supplies, uniforms, books and scholarships they needed to attend school. Because of you, 26,647 children and young adults were able to go to school — empowered with the tools to one day break free from poverty!

For many families, the cost of school — fees, uniforms and supplies — forces an impossible choice between putting food on the table or giving their children the opportunity to learn. And when children aren’t in school, especially girls, they face a higher risk of child marriage, child labor or trafficking.

Your generosity protected children’s futures all around the world. From nurturing preschool programs in Colombia to helping girls in India stay in school and avoid early marriage, your impact is powerful. You haven’t just given children the chance to learn. You’ve equipped them to transform their families and communities.

One young woman in Ethiopia, once supported through Holt’s education programs, has now graduated from college and is ready to give back to her community — paying forward the same help she once received. Her story is just one among thousands.

Countless lives have been lifted, changed and set on a new path — all because of you.

In every community we serve, our priority is keeping families together. This past year, you made it possible for 40,235 children who were at risk of separation to remain in the care of their families.

For many children around the world, adoption can offer the promise of a permanent, loving family. But before adoption is ever considered, we first strive to help them grow up in the loving care of their birth family, whenever possible.

Your support made it possible to meet each family’s unique needs, whether that meant providing safe housing, school supplies or even livestock to create a sustainable source of food and income. Beyond meeting physical needs, you also strengthened families through nutrition support, education, parenting classes, counseling and community‑based care.

Your generosity helped one young girl in Thailand stay within her family by placing her in the care of her grandparents. Instead of entering an orphanage, she is now growing up surrounded by familiar love and support — because you made family preservation possible. Stories like hers reflect the life‑changing impact of your commitment to keeping families together.

In 2025, your generosity helped 2,300 children with disabilities live fuller, happier lives. Because of you, children received vital physical, occupational and speech therapies tailored to their unique needs. Through Gifts of Hope, you helped provide life‑changing adaptive equipment — such as wheelchairs and hearing aids — giving children greater independence and mobility. Your support also helped reduce barriers to education, opening doors for children with disabilities to learn, grow and reach their fullest potential.

Your impact stretched across the globe. In Vietnam, you made it possible for children with disabilities to receive special education and participate in an outreach program in a community where many would otherwise remain at home each day. In Mongolia, you supported a program serving children with disabilities in impoverished communities, helping them access the specialized resources and care they need to thrive.

For one 3-year-old with cerebral palsy, your generosity changed everything. In 2025, with your help, he learned how to walk. Watch this heartwarming video of him taking his very first steps— an unforgettable moment made possible because of you.

This past year, your generosity helped 3,794 children living in orphanages, group homes, and kinship or foster families. Because of you, children received what they needed to thrive — from nutritious food to essential medical support.

Your generosity provided nurturing, attentive care for children living in orphanages and helped young people who grew up in institutional care transition toward independent living after aging out.

Through Holt’s kinship and foster care programs, children who might otherwise grow up in institutions were able to experience family-like care. Kinship care supported children living with relatives, while foster families provided loving, one‑on‑one care for children preparing to reunite with their birth families or join permanent families through adoption.

In 2025, we celebrated 60 years of foster care in Korea, honoring the extraordinary foster mothers whose love and dedication have changed the lives of thousands of children. Look back on six decades of impact in this reflection piece.

In 2025, you helped 181 children join permanent, loving families through adoption, including 87 children united with families through international adoption and 94 through domestic adoption to families living in the child’s country of birth.

Your gifts provided the nurturing, attentive care children needed while they waited to join their families. You helped fund adoption grants so financial barriers didn’t stand in the way of a child joining a family and you supported the social work required to ensure every adoption met the highest ethical standards.

This past year, families shared powerful stories of adopting children from around the world — from the Philippines and Colombia to Haiti and Thailand! And with the support of Holt’s team in Uganda, a 7-year-old girl joined a permanent, loving family through domestic adoption.

The number of children with special needs joining adoptive families internationally continues to grow each year. Today, 95% of children waiting for families have special needs, and 44% of children adopted internationally have moderate to major needs.

Visit our waiting child photolisting to learn more about children waiting for families who are older, in sibling groups or have complex special needs and how you can begin the process to adopt.

Because of you, 6,844 post‑adoption services were provided to adoptees and their families in 2025 — 2,027 more services than in 2024. This increase reflects both expanded outreach and the growing need for post‑adoption support. These services range from help with citizenship and access to adoption records to facilitating birth family searches and providing counseling for adoptees and parents navigating identity and family dynamics.

Last summer, Holt celebrated 42 years of Holt Adoptee Camp, a unique program that builds community and supports adoptee identity development. Through fun, games and meaningful conversations, adoptee youth connected with peers and counselors who share the experience of growing up adopted in a safe, supportive space.

The year 2025 also marked the 50th anniversary of Holt’s Korea Heritage Tour, which began in 1975 when the first generation of Korean adoptees came of age. This tour, along with others, offered adoptees and their families a powerful opportunity to connect with their heritage, explore identity and build community with other adoptees.

Explore our upcoming 2026 heritage tours to China, Korea and Vietnam.

And last but not least, in 2025, you gave 6,380 Gifts of Hope! Because of you, hungry children were fed, mothers started small businesses, children’s feet were protected with new shoes and families received livestock — like goats and chickens — to provide nourishment and generate vital income.

You impacted families all over the globe. In Colombia, you empowered a mother to start her own business from home. In India, a girl stayed in school and continued dreaming about her future. In Vietnam, a boy received a bicycle so he could get to school. And in Cambodia, a widow was able to feed her family and rebuild hope.

You also gave to Holt’s Where Most Needed Fund, making it possible for our staff and partners around the world to respond quickly and meet urgent needs that might otherwise have gone unmet.

Without you, many children and families would have gone without food, education and lifesaving care in 2025. Because of you, countless families are beginning 2026 with renewed hope, dignity and opportunity. Thank you for making a difference!