Heart to Heart

For 25 years, Yayasan Emmanuel has been driven by a simple yet inspiring mission: helping people in need. The approach turned out to be powerful enough to turn the dreams of a fresh university graduate into a small, Bogor-based initiative, and slowly but surely, a multifaceted organization that has helped more than 2.8 million families and children.

“When I see people in need, I try to do something,” says founder and JIS Class of 1997 Alum Emmanuel Laumonier. “You can’t see somebody starving and say, ‘That’s not my area of expertise’. If you see someone hungry, you’re going to try to feed them.”

The non-profit currently runs eight programs that facilitate technology in distance and digital learning, feed the hungry, improve public health, open doors to education, and much more, helping some 20,000 people each month. Knowing that they, too, could make an impact, companies and organizations from various industries line up to support its causes, including multinational banks, five-star hotels, and international schools.

But Yayasan Emmanuel’s beginnings were humble, and its founder’s dream of changing lives seemed nearly impossible. Still, Emmanuel was determined to make that “big leap of faith [and] stick with it” — doing nothing was simply not an option. He recalls being in New York after graduating with a degree in biology and anthropology, doing work in genetic research and being encouraged to go into academia. And yet, he couldn’t help but compare the fortunate lives of the people around him — “driving their own cars and having a fantastic education” — to the daily struggles faced by the orphans and street children he had been working with in Indonesia since he was 15. 

“It didn’t feel fair. Why was I allowed to do genetic research, learn astronomy and all these wonderful things, while people in Indonesia were struggling with the basics?”

At the age of 20, he decided to return to his childhood home of Bogor, West Java, with big dreams and enough money saved up to rent an old house and renovate it into an orphanage.

“It was a big decision and tough in the beginning. We had nothing — not even water to drink,” he recalls. “We had to go to the local warung to get boiled water in a plastic bag. We had no glasses or cups. Our cupboards were Indomie boxes.”

Today, he can laugh at the memory of being “young with no track record, going to companies and asking for donations”, but the challenges he encountered on a daily basis back then would shape him.

“I’d spend the day fundraising, then come back in the afternoon to check on the kids. They’d be fighting with broken glass bottles — they were street kids.”

His tireless efforts did not go unnoticed. More and more people began to recognize Yayasan Emmanuel’s work and its impact on the lives of children in need, leading to a steady rise in support from individuals and institutions alike. 

“From the first 10 kids, we went up to 42 kids, and then in a year, we were helping over 100 kids. Soon after, it became 300, then 400,” Emmanuel recounts. “In a couple of years, every month we were helping over 2,000 kids.”

As the number of children under the yayasan care grew, so did the scope of its programs, expanding from the original orphanage to addressing a broad spectrum of needs. The EduNation Outreach Programme, for example, works with 500 schools to provide scholarships to underprivileged children, benefiting 19,000 so far with a high school diploma; the Individuals with Disabilities Education and Assistance (IDEA) Programme helps people with disabilities and special needs in partnership with businesses and community organizations; and the Food Rescue Programme (FRP) collects prepared and perishable food from 40 four- and five-star hotels across Jakarta to distribute to scavenger communities, with 500 tons of food distributed since 2003.

The Innovative Schools Programme (ISP), especially, is near and dear to both Emmanuel and JIS, with our school providing facilities and volunteer teachers for its workshops each year. Launched in 2009, the ISP facilitates comprehensive teacher-training workshops for state-school educators, focusing on classroom management and interactive, global-standard teaching approaches. It was quickly endorsed by the Jakarta Education Agency and has been showered with praise by high-ranking Education Ministry officials.

“I love ISP because it has had such an impact on the participants. The whole thing about ISP is that we are all a bunch of people who care about education and love education. All the JIS teachers are giving back out of their free time — they are not paid volunteers.”

Many ISP alumni have gone through the program up to four times, with the best of them offering their new-found skills to train teachers in other provinces at the request of the government. The results, Emmanuel says, speak for themselves: “ISP participants teach differently and lead differently.”

Yayasan Emmanuel is far from slowing down as it remains committed to finding ways to reach more underserved communities. Emmanuel credits its success to the dedication of his team, many of whom have worked with the foundation for over a decade. 

“It’s not just about skills or experience — it’s about heart,” he emphasizes. “The team members and volunteers who stick with us truly believe in what we’re doing.”

Find out more and consider supporting Yayasan Emmanuel.