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After spending 14 years in a children's home I have been able to experience firsthand how vulnerable we can be in our childhood and adolescence but also how strong and capable we can be to bring out the best in each one of us.  

Many will look at me as a victim of the system but nevertheless with the passage of time I have been able to consider myself victorious over the difficulties that I have had to go through during my life.  

At 17 years old I left the system called “home for children” where I was raised by police officers from the time I was 4 years and began to face an unknown world in which I would have to put into practice my strengths and virtues that I was able to develop during my childhood.  

The greatest virtue that led me to strengthen myself internally was hope.  Until today I have been able to keep hope by my side for the life projects I have and I have not lost it.  As the saying goes, “hope is the last thing to be lost.”  

After having worked 10 years for a large airline, having traveled to various countries around the world and having been promoted 6 times to obtain increasingly better benefits and resources that helped me meet my needs and those of my family... I learned to share and help because others can also have hope for a better life.  

I had the privilege of living abroad, learning another language and studying in New Zealand at the South Pacific Bible College. While there God opened a great door for me to study theology and counseling where I graduated with excellence.  With this experience I was able to better understand one of the purposes for which we are in this world: to know God, our Creator and to make known His great virtues and mercy through love for others.  

I got married in the United States where I was greatly blessed with an excellent wife who, thank God, is by my side and shares the same desire and call from God to serve others.  We returned to Chile more than 9 years ago.  Now we are a family and God has given us wonderful children.  

Together with my wife during the pandemic we saw a great need in the camps where many children stood in long lines hoping to get food.  At that moment, those memories of my childhood bloomed again.  I saw myself reflected in the lives of each of them and we decided to do something to help them.  

Together we decided to start this foundation called “Changing Lives”  in which we want to share with children, men and women the great love of God and help them develop the gifts and virtues that each one possesses in order to be a great instrument for others in this world and help those in need.  Like me, one day I was helped by someone else and this produced a great life change in me. 

Someone said, “He who has more is not richer, but he who helps with what he has.”  I want to invite you to join this great cause in which together we can cause a great impact on those who are within our reach, that you can be part of our great team, and that together we experience a great change in our lives and in that of others.  

Welcome to Changing Lives. 

You are cordially greeted by its founder, Marcelo Toro