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 Tina Allen is the Founder and Executive Director of Liddle Kidz Foundation Global. Ms. Allen created the international outreach component of the foundation to address the critical emotional and developmental needs of children who are orphaned and abandoned throughout the world.
Ms. Allen shapes and approves foundation strategies, reviews results, advocates for the foundation’s issues, and helps set the overall direction of the organization. She oversees internal and external communications to advance and protect the foundation’s reputation and to build awareness of foundation focus areas. In her work, she meets with local, national, and international partners to further the foundation’s goal of improving the lives of children in the United States and around the world through the use of nurturing touch. She strives to build strategic relationships that are critical to the foundation's work and uses her many public appearances, including speeches, interviews, and articles, to focus attention on these issues.
 Ms. Allen works directly with her volunteer ambassadors to expand opportunity to the world’s most disadvantaged children and their caregivers by collaborating with partner organizations and doing educational site visits. She also participates in international events, and travels extensively to focus attention on the issues the foundation champions.
 Ms. Allen began her major voluntary efforts in 1998, when she joined Heart Touch International, an organization providing compassionate touch to homebound and hospitalized clients. In her role as a volunteer massage therapist working with vulnerable populations, her focus was providing hands-on care to men and women who were non-ambulatory due to their diagnosis of AIDS. Through this work, Ms. Allen had the opportunity to learn how powerful touch is to those who are considered untouchable. One of her clients, a gentleman who she had seen for over 3 years, said that his only joy during the week was her Saturday morning visit to his bedside. He learned about the world outside during those visits and called Ms. Allen “[his] window on the world!”
 Two years after becoming a volunteer with the organization, Ms. Allen was asked to join the organization’s board of directors as the youngest board member in the group’s history. During this time she was instrumental in grant writing, fundraising, healthcare partnerships, advocacy and training of professional volunteers. She realized first hand the need of providing such care to infants and children and began to seek out opportunities to provide services to children with special healthcare needs. It was through this beginning that she realized the impact that nurturing touch can have for children and the caregivers around them.
 as she always does, and knowing the plight of children throughout the world, Ms. Allen developed the Liddle Kidz Foundation Global to offer these same nurturing services to infants and children who are often forgotten, discarded or considered untouchable. As the number of orphans escalates around the world, there is an increasing demand for sensory stimulation, nurturing touch and palliative care within orphanages and childcare settings.
 It is the vision of Tina Allen and Liddle Kidz Foundation Global to make a true difference for children who have been orphaned, along with their caregivers who lack the necessary support to provide them with best developmental care possible.
Ms. Allen hales from Los Angeles, California, but calls the Liddle Kidz Foundation tour bus home. She mixes a rock n’ roll lifestyle, with advocacy and evidence based-practice to promote the efficacy of nurturing touch. Ms. Allen is joined “on the road” by her very supportive husband, their young son, LKF Global Development Program Coordinator Kristina Balcom and three cats.
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