Charity Pillar – The American Women's Club of Seville

Charity & Volunteering

Charity is an essential part of our club activities and enables us to give back to this wonderful city that so many of us now call home. Half of our membership dues are allocated to the Club’s charity fund. In addition, special events and raffles add to our charity support.

May Book Exchange/Sale

Indian Cooking
Class

Christmas Toy
Drive

Winter Mulled Wine Fundraiser

Quarantine
Raffle

DONATE VOLUNTEER

With philanthropy as one of the Club’s main pillars, our charity funds support two local organizations, Sonrisa de un Niño and El Pozo Santo. The charity team maintains a close relationship with these organizations to ensure that we can maximize our support. If necessary, special appeals are set up to help the charities if an unexpected crisis arises.

La Sonrisa de un Niño

This day care center/nursery school is in a modest neighborhood in Seville Este. The Association provides meals, educational materials and toiletries, including disposable diapers for the infants and children in their care.

La Sonrisa de un Niño was founded in 1969 and became an Association in 1986. The Junta de Andalucía provides some assistance in return for which the Association provides free places for an additional 30 children in the nursery school. This enables financially struggling parents to work. The remainder of the funding comes from private donations.

La Sonrisa de un Niño focuses its support on desperately deserving families providing food, clothing, household goods and occasionally medicines. The center is constantly in need of children’s clothes, disposable diapers, cots, strollers, bedding, food and other basic everyday items.

El Pozo Santo

The Hospital of the Santísimo Cristo de los Dolores (Holy Christ of the Sorrows) known as El Pozo Santo (the Holy Well) takes its name to the plaza in which the residence is located.

The organization was founded in 1666 by Marta de Jesús Carrillo and Beatriz Jerónima de la Concepción, two extraordinary women from the order of San Francisco de Assisi. They created the first home for impoverished, infirm, disabled women in the province of Seville, and its doors have remained open without interruption for more than 350 years.

The residence has a capacity for 100 women. Husbands of women who have already taken up residence there may also be admitted. The Junta de Andalucía provides some subsidies for some residents’ upkeep, but with so many people to care for and the astronomical cost of maintaining a large, 350-year-old building, Pozo Santo is perpetually short of funds.