So I recently got back from my spring break trip to Romania, where I helped with an orphanage called the Home of Hope. It was an amazing experience for me, and when I got back to the States I realized that it would be a cool Sims 3 challenge! I'm starting it now, and I'd love to get testers too, to see how they like it.

IN CAS
Create a YA married couple. The Home of Hope is designed to place orphans in strong family units where they have a mother and father.
RULES ABOUT TRAITS
- Their traits can be anything you wish, but keep in mind that they're running an orphanage, so child-friendly traits like Family-Oriented and (if you have Generations) Nurturing are helpful.
-Also keep in mind that traditionally the father gets a job outside the home while the mother stays at home with the children, so you may use traits for the father's career.
-The father, however, may NOT be employed in the Criminal career. Kind of hard to raise well-nurtured children with a criminal for a father.
COUPLE'S OWN CHILDREN
- If you wish, you may create (or procreate in-game) your own biological children, but just for the sake of leaving room for the orphans, limit yourself to three of the parent's own biological children.

BUILDING THE ORPHANAGE
-Buy an empty lot. It doesn't really matter what size, but it's ideal if it's big enough to have a small playground for the children.
-Build your orphanage. You may use money cheats if you want, or you may choose to be more realistic and use what funds you have. Ideally, you will want a two-story building. Living room, dining room, and kitchen are downstairs while the bedrooms and bathrooms are upstairs.
-Each child is to have his/her own bed. Only the parents have a double bed. Children can share bedrooms, however. For a realistic factor, you can keep teenagers in one bedroom, children in another, etc.

PLAYING AND RULES
-You can change the rules to suit your own playing style (individuality is great!). I will post some rules, though, that you can go by as you wish.
-No cheats except to get a Sim unstuck (reset Firstname Lastname), or to get traits that were dropped by a glitch.
-Normal lifespan.
-The father must get a job outside the home on the first day so he can support the family, as long as it's not the Criminal career.
-Start adopting! The goal is to have (and to keep) a full house. I've found that it's always easier to ease up to six kids rather than adopting six right off the bat. Don't overwhelm yourself -it's not good for the orphans! Start off slow and add on when you can handle more.
-Adopt randomly. Don't just adopt infants! Toddlers and children need a home too! You can use an RNG if you wish to determine which age you adopt (and what gender), or whatever method you like, but try to accept a variety of children. This goes for gender too. Try to have a mostly even mix of boys and girls.
-When the orphans reach young adulthood, it is expected that they will go to college, so move them out within five days of their reaching adulthood. This will make room for more orphans.
-NO boarding school.
-Orphans need a lot of love and interaction. Many of their parents have abandoned them. So try and get a good relationship with each child (this goes for mother AND father, even though father works).
-Randomize each child's traits, even if they're "bad" or you don't like them. Orphans aren't always easy kids to take care of!
-Just take care of the orphans throughout your couple's life! Be the best parents you can be!

NEARING ELDERS
Obviously your wonderful house parents will grow old at some point, and someone else will need to take over the orphanage. So in the days before your Adult couple reaches Elder status (perhaps 6-10 days before), momentarily stop adopting children. You will now search for your replacements.
-Your replacements have to be a new YA couple, or a new YA you plan on having marry right away. It can't be one of the children. This is just so the new house parents will be parents to all, rather than parenting brothers and sisters.
-You can create this couple in CAS and just move them in, or look for someone out in town. You can ask a single YA Sim to move in and have them immediately start looking for a mate. They have to be married by the time they take over the orphanage.

And thus you keep playing as long as you like. If you have any questions (or any progress and pictures on your game), let me know!

ADDITIONAL CHALLENGES FOR AUTHENTICITY
To make your game more like the actual Home of Hope in Braila, Romania, try adding these additional restrictions/challenges!
-If you're keen to, use Create-A-World to create Romania! Keep in mind that Romania is the second-poorest country in eastern Europe, so the houses will definitely not be lavish (except in the mountains - that's where the wealthier, tourist-y area of Romania is). Create a little town far away from the general public and create some lepers to dwell there, as the last leper colony in Europe. Create a little gypsy village with tan-skinned Sims (don't forget outhouses - gypsies' toilets are not inside their homes!). Be creative!
-As Romania is a poor country, don't use any money cheats and don't furnish your orphanage with expensive things. It should be a nice, clean, healthy orphanage, but by no means wealthy.
-You can use chores or a part-time job to allow a teenage orphan to save up for their own personal computer. (Or they could steal $800 from their house parents and buy it that way...that did happen at the actual Home of Hope.)
-Create some dogs. Dogs are everywhere in Romania.
-There are actually four houses (and four house families) in the Home of Hope, so if you wish to make things more challenging, create four families. Periodically play as each one.
-You can use mods to allow yourself to control more Sims per family. In the actual Home of Hope, there are 9-14 children per family.
-The actual Home of Hope accepts children ages 5-19, so if you wanted, you could also restrict yourself to only adopting children (not infants or toddlers).
-Never call a babysitter unless you absolutely NEED to.
-Don't forget to take children to the park sometimes! They don't ALWAYS need to stay cooped up in the orphanage.

You can add any other challenges you like.

The challenge reminds me of a challenge from TS2. I may give it a try. I don't do a lot of adopting in my games.

I've actually been thinking about doing something like this. I might do it when I finish my random legacy so that I can make it into a blog. :D

I tried doing an orphanage style challenge a while back. I ended up having to restart due to my save imploding or something. What I changed from the first round and the second try was instead of Adopting via the phone - which ends up making the kids have your name and the game assigns them genetically as your kids and each sibling as genetically their sibling - I just started shift-click cheating to add random babies and children to my family. That way they got to keep their names and lineage, the town wouldn't end up with a bunch of related people with the same name in a few generations, and if they wanted to, the kids could marry each other when they got older.

skmt999 how do you get that cheat to work?

I started this but instead of a mother and father i just have a mother

What a great challenge! Sure gonna try it .

Like the idea of having just a mother, thx for that Skritdlez

Open the console by pressing Control + Shift + C. You'll see a blue bar at the top of the game, this is the console. now, type in testingCheatsEnabled true and press Enter to activate the code.
Shift-clicking a non-household Sim will provide you with the option to 'Add to Household.'

I think it would be cool to have a grandmother who is about to die (as the owner) then have a son or someone (must be a male) come and take over.

Awsome! Ill try it out for sure!

Its cool, I made a place in Riverview, and I lived right beside a park. Cool :D

I've started this challenge. My orphanage is pretty big. 3 levels. I have one room for the boys and one room for the girls. I used the blueprints to help decorate the rooms. The girls room has 4 regular beds and 3 cribs and the boys have 4 beds & 4 cribs.

I think I will do what skmt999 suggested though in terms of adding new children. Probably do the paper boy/girl next. They already have 1 daughter named Lilah. Dad is in military career.

I could do this after the camp survival challenge and hotel challenge. Sounds like a lot of fun.

It's a great thing I have a house already saved, it's only one story though... But it has enough beds for 24 sims (I have mods, but it won't work with adoption so I'll just redecorate the rooms)

Ok so I found a way to make it so I can adopt for than 7 kids, Now I have around 12 kids, 2 of them are teens, 8 of them are children and 2 of them are toddlers(I adopted at random so a few of them I adopted as babies...)