Foundation history, team and white papers

We thought seven times before opening the fund.
It seems there are so many funds now!
Why do we need another?

And then this letter came:
“Hi, I am the mother of a special child. Bogdan is 11 years old and studies in Class 5A. We live in the village and go to school from the first grade. Bogdan loves to study and loves to communicate with his classmates at school. He really wants to go out into the corridor during the break and play with the other kids. But we don’t have such an opportunity, because we can’t buy a wheelchair on which Bogdan himself would move and feel like an independent little man. He dreams of how he will go to visit friends in a wheelchair, to the cinema and also to the beach. We have the Kama river nearby, and Bogdan loves to swim, he learned to swim a long time ago. My son is growing, and he is already shy that he can not walk like everyone else and begins to withdraw into himself. But as a mother, I try my hardest to help him and explain that he is the same as everyone else. I ask you very much to help Bogdan make his dream come true. After all, he loves the nature, animals, fishing, loves all people on Earth. You just can’t imagine how he dreams and what joy he has on his face when he talks about how he will walk BY HIMSELF.”

And then came another letter, and another.

But this one was memorable. We felt ashamed that the boy is freer in the Kama River than in a school on the ground. Although it was not yet our boy, but still.

We were asked to support collections for such boys (and girls and adults too), collections on personal cards and through social networks, because there was simply no fund that collected money for active wheelchairs. Yes, these are “wrong” collections, opaque, but what to do with hundreds of requests for help? Wait for a fund to show up ready to do the right thing?

We waited, and then we waited some more.

Bloggers picked up our-not-our children — their photos hang on our website in the subsection “While we were opening the fund” — and through social networks they collected money for the wheelchairs. We didn’t even have time to post a collection for a wheelchair for Lisa Alert employee — in fifteen minutes it was closed by colleagues from the detachment, to whom we wrote about our plans. Until these fifteen minutes, a very good person toiled with his lack of independence for many years, and then one letter — and now he himself can fold the wheelchair, throw it in the trunk and go out for the search. He is still somewhere out there, looking for lost people.

So another year passed, a year of random collections and heartbreaking stories and letters, and we finally decided that all these boys, girls and adults were ours, and their friends and relatives were ours, and if we need a fund to help them, we will open a fund.

And we opened.

You can write to us if you need help with a wheelchair. We work with wards all over Russia.
And if your loved one needs help, too. Sometimes it’s easier to ask not for yourself, but for someone else. We understand this.