Hermann Gmeiner, a young Austrian medical student during World War II, started the first SOS Children's Villages after seeing so many children orphaned or abandoned.   His vision has grown to become the largest non-denominational children's care provider in the world. Today, 450 Villages in 132 nations are home to more than 60,000 children.

In 1993 the Lockport SOS Children’s Village was opened and today has 18 individual homes on a beautiful campus.  The landscape design reverently transformed the agrarian environs into a nurturing and vibrant community space, creating a harmony between the Prairie School architecture of Rudolph Architects and the indigenous prairie that thrived there for so long before.  This design solution utilizes the natural palette of materials and forms to produce an embracing, warm, and pastoral home, a time-tested sanctuary for the successful raising and nurturing of children.