Longtime SOS Children’s Villages President Helmut Kutin has died

The organization announced this in a press release on Tuesday. “We are grateful for his tireless commitment and work,” said Managing Director Christian Moser.

He lived a life for children who need help. South Tyrolean-born Helmut Kutin was proposed by SOS Children’s Villages founder Hermann Gmeiner as his successor and held the presidency of SOS Children’s Villages International from 1985 to 2012. “You only save the world in small ways,” he once said. He contributed a lot to saving the world. Now a great life full of commitment and helpfulness ended.

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“The world is not so much lacking in goodwill, but rather in concrete implementation into action. We can all make a small contribution every day” – this is what Helmut Kutin wanted from society and put it into practice himself around. His life’s work and his calling were always closely linked to his own history: Kutin was born on October 4, 1941, as the youngest of five children in a family of lawyers in Bolzano. His mother and eldest sister died when he was young. His father’s citizenship was taken away due to the political situation and the family was torn apart in the turmoil of the Second World War.

In 1953, twelve-year-old Helmut came to the first SOS Children’s Village in Imst. “I was happy to call an entire house for my siblings and me, embedded in a village for many children, my home,” Kutin once said about his first day in this world’s first facility. From the very beginning, he experienced the SOS Children’s Village family as a good family: “We were comrades in fate and stuck together.”

Kutin appointed honorary president

In 1967, a decisive turning point followed that would change his life and shape it from then on: After intensive discussions with Hermann Gmeiner, Kutin went to Vietnam to set up the first and, at the time, largest SOS Children’s Village in the world. He then ensured that the idea spread quickly throughout Southeast Asia. He took over the management of the SOS Children’s Village in Saigon, today’s Ho Chi Minh City, but had to leave Vietnam a year after the end of the war in 1976.

Because of his extraordinary achievements, Kutin was appointed Asia representative of SOS Children’s Villages International in 1971. Within a few years, Kutin had established over 50 SOS Children’s Villages and another 50 social institutions in Asia. Hermann Gmeiner, who founded SOS Children’s Villages in 1949, proposed Kutin as his successor while he was still alive.

In 2012 – after 27 years of implementation and passion – Kutin handed over the SOS Children’s Villages presidency to the Indian Siddhartha Kaul. In 2017, his time as President of SOS Children’s Villages Austria ended. In recognition of his work, he was made honorary president.