The Char Fasson Children’s Fund was born of a series of disconnected yet serendipitous events—the result of several American women having similar desires to make this world a better place for their having lived here.  The focal point of these humanitarian efforts is a struggling orphanage in a small town in one of the poorest countries in the world—Bangladesh.

In 2008 Lesley Siemens, a Registered Nurse and child advocate traveled to Thailand to teach English to young nursing students.  At the end of her posting, she found herself reluctant to return home to America and struggled with the feeling that she had more to accomplish while she was still in Asia.  She decided to realize a life-long dream and searched for the right opportunity on the Internet.  She made a connection with the Char Fasson orphanage and arranged a personal visit.

Upon her arrival, she found a group of some seventy young boys living in deplorable conditions in a run-down collection of old, decrepit, and even condemned buildings.  What she also found was a small group of dedicated Bangladeshis who were committed to housing and feeding this group of “orphans of poverty” and who were barely managing to scrape by on almost no funding and extremely limited resources. It was explained to her that the needs in Char Fasson were so great that the number of boys could easily be doubled if only they had the resources, but that the daily struggle to provide just the most basic of requirements and the strictures of their extremely limited budget made it impossible to serve any more children.

As Lesley became more familiar with the administrators and the boys, the depth of need facing this struggling organization touched her soul and she made a pledge then and there to do whatever she could to improve their conditions.

While at the orphanage, Lesley met another American, Tiffany Hodge, a graduate student who had also been deeply touched by the dire plight of the orphans.  Tiffany has returned to the orphanage several times since making a 2001 volunteer trip there with DePauw University. Faced with the reality of the very limited existing resources, these two gathered together a network of like-minded women and an organization was born.  The Char Fasson Children’s Fund is the coming together of the diverse dreams of these women from many walks of life–women desiring to make a difference.