John Melchior Bosco, SDB, popularly known as Don Bosco, was an Italian Catholic priest, educator and writer of the 19th century. While working in Turin, where the population suffered many of the ill effects of industrialization and urbanization, he dedicated his life to the betterment and education of street children, juvenile delinquents, and other disadvantaged youth. He developed teaching methods based on love rather than punishment, a method that became known as the Salesian Preventive System.

The Salesians of Don Bosco (SDB), formally known as the Society of Saint Francis de Sales, is a religious congregation of men in the Catholic Church, founded in 1859 by the Italian priest John Bosco to help poor and migrant youngsters during the Industrial Revolution. The congregation was named after Francis de Sales, a 17th-century bishop of Geneva.