Our Story
What began with helping individual children has grown into a mission to provide verified, life-saving care.
Our Mission
Our mission is to help children with kidney disease receive medical care when their families cannot afford treatment.
Began in the Philippines as the pilot program and expand to other parts of Southeast Asia as the foundation grows.
Vision for Growth
Gerald Hanson, Founder
Gerald Hanson is the founder of the International Children's Kidney Foundation (dba Vital Care for Kids) and brings more than five decades of medical and healthcare experience to the organization.
After graduating from the University of Washington in 1968, Gerald served as a Medical Service Corps Officer in the U.S. Army. During his year-long deployment in Vietnam, he worked as a medical advisor to the Cambodian Army, training combat medics and overseeing battlefield medical treatment and air ambulance evacuations.
Following his military service, Gerald completed the Physician Assistant Program at Yale Medical School. He practiced medicine for five years before founding Hanson Medical, Inc., a company specializing in custom reconstructive and cosmetic medical implants, as well as topical scar therapy products.
Throughout his career, Gerald has worked closely with physicians, hospitals, and patients around the world. His lifelong commitment to improving lives through medicine led him to establish Vital Care for Kids, where he now focuses on helping children in the Philippines receive life-saving kidney care that would otherwise be beyond their families' financial reach.
Why He Started the Foundation
The inspiration for Vital Care for Kids began with a deeply personal experience.
While helping his niece receive treatment for lupus-related kidney disease in Cebu City, Philippines, Gerald accompanied her to nephrology clinics and witnessed firsthand the challenges families face in accessing specialized kidney care.
During one clinic visit, he met a two-year-old girl whose kidney disease was treatable but whose family could not afford the diagnostic tests and medical care she urgently needed. Those services were unavailable through the local public hospital.
Determined to help, Gerald arranged and paid for her transfer to a private hospital, where she received the specialized treatment she required. Under the care of her physician, the young girl's kidney function gradually returned to normal, and she continues to live a healthy life with ongoing medication.
That experience opened Gerald's eyes to a much larger problem. He discovered that many children with kidney disease were being denied life-saving treatment simply because their families could not afford the necessary diagnostic tests, medical devices, medications, or surgery.
Rather than helping one child at a time, Gerald founded Vital Care for Kids to provide financial support for verified medical care, giving children throughout the Philippines the opportunity to receive the treatment they need to survive, recover, and build healthy futures.