Lumos and the producers of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child have released more tickets to the gala performance of the play, which will be held on Sunday September 18th, in an online auction to benefit Lumos. J.K. Rowling will attend and introduce the play at the gala which will show Part One and Two consecutively. The tickets are available through the online auction website Givergy with opening bids starting at £100 for two tickets for both Part One and Part Two of the play.

Tickets are combined with special prizes and collectable items, including signed copies of the script book and VIP tickets to Warner Bros Studio Tour London – The Making of Harry Potter.

Thanks to the generosity of the play’s producers and Lumos’ 100% Pledge, every penny donated and raised in the auction will go directly to Lumos’ Families Not Orphanages Fund that will help children in the countries where Lumos works to leave orphanages and return to a family life.  Donations do not go towards administration, fundraising or overhead costs.

The gala performance of the play is one of a series of exciting events for Lumos this Autumn in the We Are Lumos Worldwide campaign aimed at enhancing awareness of the harm caused to children placed in orphanages and raising funds for Lumos’ Families Not Orphanages Fund.  Other events include an advance screening of the new film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in New York City on 12 November, with a chance to see J.K. Rowling in conversation with the film’s main star and Academy Award-winner Eddie Redmayne.

An estimated eight million children around the world live in orphanages and institutions, despite 80% having at least one living parent that could care for them with some support.

A new, two minute film, showing how Lumos helps individual families and children, has also been released today. It tells the story of Lumos’ work to reunite one mother with her baby, who had been sent to an institution as soon he was born, due to a disability diagnosis at birth – just one of the 2,376 children supported by the organisation in the last year to leave orphanages.

Over the past decade, Lumos has helped thousands of other children – from infants to older children – return to family life in Central and Eastern Europe and more recently in Haiti. Now, in its second decade, Lumos is expanding its work in Latin America and the Caribbean, and other regions around the world with the aim to end institutionalisation of children globally by 2050.