Our Mission

Every day Bridges to Healing provides health care services to hundreds of children living in institutional care settings in Bolivia and Tanzania.  We focus our work in three main areas. 

First, children and young adults suffering from chronic and rare diseases and conditions like HIV/AIDS, Sickle Cell Anemia, Chagas Disease, Zika, tumors, asthma, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and many others.  

Second, children and young adults with disabilities like down syndrome, blindness, deafness, hydrocephaly and psychiatric illness. 

Third, we provide health care to young women fleeing gender-based violence.

We believe that, whenever safe and possible, young people should live with their parent(s) or relatives. To that end, Bridges to Healing also provides funding for community health workers to work with disabled children from extremely poor families who may be at high-risk of abandonment.  

The founders of Bridges to Healing, a social worker and a physician, worked in orphanages in Bolivia in the mid-1990s. They learned that providing health care to children living in institutions can be complicated and challenging.  They cared for many sick children who suffered in pain day after day because of a lack of health care.  

What is our obligation to these innocent, sick children who are often left alone to fend for themselves in this world?  

We believe they have a right to live with dignity, access to appropriate medical care, and someone in their life that is making a concerted effort to alleviate the pain that they suffer due to illness and disease.  

Our work began with one orphanage in 2000 and in 2010 we established a 501c3 nonprofit organization, BTH International, to expand our work into more orphanages in Bolivia. In 2023, we opened new projects in Tanzania to serve the disabled and young women affected by gender-based violence.