Established by campaigner Thomas Coram as The Foundling Hospital, Coram is the UK's oldest children's charity and has been supporting vulnerable children for over 280 years.
We now help a million children and young people every year, continuing our work as the first children’s charity and birthplace of children’s social care in the UK.
Voices Through Time: The Story of Care is a programme run by Coram and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, where we are revealing untold stories about the lives of children and young people at the Foundling Hospital.
The Foundling Hospital was the UK’s first home for children whose mothers were unable to care for them, also known as ‘Foundlings’. On the Voices Through Time programme we have digitised over 100,000 records from the Coram Foundling Hospital archive, and we’ll be making them available online, so people can learn about its history and the history of children in care over time.
As part of the programme, we are transcribing the archive records through an online volunteer project. We are also running creative projects with young people who have been in care, where they explore the Foundling Hospital history and their own experiences of care through the archive records.
Our Opportunities
Are you passionate about history? Interested in getting experience of doing original research and writing? We need your help to discover the stories of children who lived at the world-famous Foundling Hospital!