A Georgia College student has started a campaign to help needy children nearly half a world away. 

When MacKenzie Roux took a trip with a group of classmates to Romania in spring 2014, the senior political science major was taken aback at the conditions of the Eastern European nation’s orphanages. Serving with a missionary group at two of the country’s oft-overcrowded homes, Roux and her classmates were surprised to find that many of the orphans’ parents were not dead, but in fact were alive and well. Impacted greatly by these children who, thanks to a law allowing guardians to surrender care of their children to the state, had essentially been abandoned, Roux wondered how these “orphans” could be allowed to live in poor conditions while their parents could not care for them themselves. When the law school hopeful returned to Romania this past summer, Roux felt compelled to show the country’s unwanted children that they are in fact loved.

“It was always there, but I never knew how to take a step further to be able to do something more,” said Roux of her desire to help the abandoned children. “I went back to Romania this past summer and worked with the same orphanages again, but the reality of seeing these kids — you just can’t prepare for it. The missionaries we worked with asked me to plan a camp for the orphans for summer 2018, and I gladly said ‘Yes, I would love to’.”

In returning to the same orphanages she had visited in 2014, Roux reconnected with Pilu and Hadasa Hadarean, a Romanian couple that operate a foster home from their house. When the Hadareans asked Roux to to organize a summer camp in conjunction with CROWN Romania, their nonprofit that finds foster homes and adoptive parents for Romanian orphans, the new advocate found herself with both a mandate and no way to fund it.

“From there, I was trying to figure out how we were going to fund this camp and how, finishing my senior year, I was going to raise that substantial amount of money,” said Roux. “My dad, kind of jokingly, said ‘Why don’t you start a nonprofit?’, and I said ‘Yeah, right; I can’t do that’ … We looked into it and had a lot of help and favor from the Lord, and the IRS told us the process could have taken up to 12 months, but we got it certified in two weeks. The name comes from James 1:27, which is: ‘Religion that the Father our God accepts as pure and faultless is to look after orphans in their distress’.”

For the past few months, Roux has operated the 1:27 Project to raise money for next year’s camp. She hopes to raise at least $15,000 for her and a team of volunteers to put on a five-day camp for a group of orphans in the country’s Parcul de Aventura Arka Park, as well as to spread Christian faith and acceptance to children who have been abandoned by their kin. Roux plans to make the camps a yearly occurrence, and hopes to one day bring her organization to orphaned and abandoned children across the world. While many charities focus on adoption and placement into foster homes for Romanian children, the 1:27 Project founder said she wants to focus on the orphans who will never have true parents of their own.

“A lot of agencies around the globe are focused on getting the children out of the orphanage and into either a foster home or a ‘forever home’,” said Roux. “That does not need to be overlooked for a second because it is a permanent fix, but the [number] of children who actually get adopted is [very slim] … these children have been robbed of the simplicity of just being a child: They don’t know if they’re going to have food, they don’t know if they’re going to get beaten up that day, they don’t know when their clothes are going to get washed, and in some situations they don’t have things like soap and toilet paper … we want to get them out of that situation.”

For more information, and to donate to the 1:27 Project, visit the project’s website at www.the127project.org or visit their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/the127project.