The Medina Home for Children was the first orphanage founded by Muslims in the UK, and was established in 1896. It took care of illegitimate children who had been abandoned.

When it opened, it was gifted a donation by Caliph Abdul Hamid II, the only direct donation from him recorded in The Crescent, but generally it was supported through weekly donations and fundraising drives by members of the Liverpool Muslim Institute in Liverpool and Manchester. The idea of the Home was that these children would be brought up as Muslims; in one 1897 address, the president of the Liverpool Muslim Institute, Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) hyperbolically hoped that they would later come to serve as the Janissaries of Islam in England. The older children took part in the life of the Muslim Liverpool Institute, joining the Eid celebrations and they formed part of a youth drill regiment based on the Ottoman model, which performed outside the Institute on the occasion of the Lord Mayor's visit for Eid al-Fitr in 1898. There are a number of reports that many of the abandoned infants taken in the Home struggled with ill-health, despite the attentions of the doctor who was employed to visit the children regularly. When any children died from ill-health at the Home, they would be buried as Muslims.

A thorough study has yet to be done on how the orphanage operated, but this much can be said. This institution was primarily run by the women associated with the LMI, both converts and non-converts; the Liverpool Mercury described it as jointly run by Muslim and Christian women. The longstanding treasurer was Quilliam's first wife, Hannah (1858-1909), who remained a devout Methodist throughout her life, notwithstanding her husband's conversion. One Indian law student at Cambridge, Mian Fazl-i-Husain (1887-1936), who founded the Cambridge Islamic student society and who later became a noted politician in British India, visited the Home in 1901 and remarked that the matron in charge knew very little of the principles of Islam to be able to teach it to the children there. The numbers of children at the Home were about ten. Ambitious plans to expand the Home to house 200 children never materialised. In 1902, it was reported that fundraising had only met a quarter of its running costs that year (the rest, some £100, was subsidized by Quilliam himself).

The Home was located at 12 Brougham Terrace (no longer existing) within the Liverpool Muslim Institute (Nos. 8-12) after its establishment in 1896, but it moved to 4 Sheil Road in 1899 (a three-storey Victorian terraced house that is still intact), and then to 68 Sheil Road (no longer existing) in 1902.