Our History

Our roots stem from 1999, when our founder Gillie Davidson took the ‘QII’ youth group from Greenbank Church in Edinburgh to a town in Andhra Pradesh in India. The group helped an Indian NGO to build a home for 120 homeless children. The number of children in the home later grew to around 500.

The experience of helping to build a children’s home led to Gillie and several of the youth group members forming Scottish Love in Action (SLA) in 2000 and creating a partnership with NASA. Since then, SLA has also formed partnerships with other grassroots Indian NGOs, ASRITHA Rainbow Home and Voice4Girls.

To date, SLA has supported thousands of children and young people through our Indian partners, who have used the funds we raise to support, care for, educate, empower and nurture vulnerable children.

Part of SLA’s vision has been to establish a social enterprise project in India to support vulnerable children and young people.

After two decades, we continue to enjoy working with our partners in India. We also benefit from a committed team of staff and volunteers in Scotland.

Our work in India and in Scotland clearly illustrates how the transformative impact and partnerships of SLA continue to flourish and strengthen, grown from the seeds planted over twenty years ago.

What’s in a name?

People are often intrigued as to how ‘Scottish Love in Action’ got its name. It was actually suggested by Dr Premdas, who was the Indian co-founder of SLA’s first project in India, along with Gillie Davidson. ‘Love in Action’ was the QII motto.

On their return from Tuni to Scotland in 1999, having built the original children’s home, Dr Premdas then challenged the group to continue to put ‘love into action’ back in Scotland. They did this by establishing SLA, thus spreading the word about the extreme need of the children Dr Premdas and NASA were working with. They were also lucky to find lots of people keen to keep supporting the life-changing work.