New fitness app for physically disabled

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Keeping active is vital for children with physical disabilities, but it can be hard to do. This is why, our colleagues at Physical Rehabilitation in St Petersburg developed Move4Fit. The first fitness application for children with motor disabilities.

Surprisingly, until now, such fitness apps for children with cerebral palsy and other physical disabilties have simply not existed. The app allows families to draw up fitness plans and set goals. The regular workouts develop their motor skills, increase confidence, and are fun.

Move4Fit won first prize in the Inclusion category of the prestigious Social Idea competition2021 organised by Russian mobile operator MTS. All the exercises and methodology behind the app were developed within the SGF-funded A-Tech project. Your support for the project is now furthering innovation as well.

Kondopoga Parish welcomes disabled children

Posted on By Sarah.SGF
Group of children, volunteers, parents and the very popular dog.

Last summer was a very special one for the Parish of Kondopoga, Karelia. An easing of restrictions allowed the summer activities to go ahead and the Parish invited ten disabled children and their parents to join the summer programme for children from disadvantaged families. As the weather was warm and sunny, most lessons and games were held outdoors and children learned new skills and made new friends.

“What a wonderful summer! We all enjoyed meetings, friends, laughter and a wonderful atmosphere at the parish. A huge thank you for this support dur- ing the hard time of covid. We also received food, shoes and school uniforms. We are looking forward as a family to growing more with the parish and cannot wait for next summer.”

Food parcels and books and school uniform for the new school year were also distributed by the parish to local families living in poverty.

Outreach to care-leavers in troubled suburb

Posted on By Sarah.SGF
Family in Lensovietsky

Lensovietsky is a new suburb of St Petersburg, which has become a “settlement of orphanage-leavers”. Its crime-rate and anti-social behaviour make it notorious. There is loud music, conflicts, fights, etc round the clock. Police raids and visits by social services have become the norm district. Understandable, orphanage-leavers are not popular with other residents. Quite apart from their antisocial lifestyle, they have run up debts for heating and water supply, and residents have complained about the disconnection of such necessary services. The infrastructure – medical, educational, social institutions – in the residential district is still underdeveloped. For leavers, this has become one of the main obstacles to their integration into society.

This is the context for a new class our partners, Sunflower, have set up this year for families in crisis with children under 5.

Continue reading Outreach to care-leavers in troubled suburb

HRH Prince Michael visits charity for orphanage-leavers in St Petersburg

Posted on By Sarah.SGF
HRH Prince Michael meets staff at the Sunflower centre

We are delighted that on 13th October our Patron, His Royal Highness, Prince Michael of Kent, visited the Sunflower Centre in St Petersburg to find out about their flagship programmes at first hand. The Sunflower Centre focuses on providing psychological support for parents who grew up in orphanages and for teenagers leaving orphanages in St. Petersburg.

Continue reading HRH Prince Michael visits charity for orphanage-leavers in St Petersburg

Astonishing, but true story of a family hit three times by hearing loss.

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Fedya in the toy bed
Fedya

Our Club for young children with hearing loss can be a huge support for families. Over the last year and a half they have been helping a family with a scarcely believable story.

Nearly a year and a half ago a mother came to our Club for the first time with her little boy, Slava, who had a Cochlear Implant (which can help profoundly deaf people perceive sounds). She was heavily pregnant, so after the first visit Slava would come with his grandmother. Continue reading Astonishing, but true story of a family hit three times by hearing loss.

Mother’s Day inspiration from Sunflower

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Timur finds it difficult to play

The session leader attracts Timur’s attention

Timur enjoys playing with his mother, who takes a more active role.

Dilyana grew up in a family and works as a teacher.  So why does she need Sunflower’s help to raise her 3-year-old son, Timur?

Families can take part in the Sunflower programme whether one or both parents grew up in an orphanage.  In this case, it is Timur’s father, Sasha, who had the orphanage childhood.  Indeed, he is the pride of his children’s home and still works there to this day.  Although on the surface, this family look as if they are coping well, Sunflower’s experience teaches them to pay particular attention to the way children are treated in families such as this.  As they put it, in families where a woman marries a man who grew up in an orphanage, it is “as if her social skills and understanding of safety are somehow blocked.  The woman from the stable background often submits to her husband’s initiative, and observes his rules, which were laid down in his children’s home past.” Continue reading Mother’s Day inspiration from Sunflower

Kindergartens equipped to look after disabled children

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Kindergarten pupilFor most children in Russia, kindergarten is the first step in a their education and the first experience of a life outside the family.  This is a stage that many disabled children miss out on because mainstream kindergartens aren’t equipped to look after them.  There just aren’t enough places in mainstream or special provision.

This term we hope that more children with special needs will have a more positive start in kindergartens, and that the staff will feel more confident meeting their needs.  Our partner organisation, Physical Rehabilitation, in St Petersburg has been running a programme particularly aimed at training kindergarten staff Continue reading Kindergartens equipped to look after disabled children

A new start for a homeless family in Georgia

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Earlier this year Artur and Christine and their four children, long-term residents at the homeless shelter we support in Tbilisi, were  able to buy a small shack in a village near Tbilisi.  It doesn’t look like much, but this shack offers a great opportunity for the family to live independently at last, particularly since it comes with land so they can grow food.

Artur and Christine are trying to bring the shack into shape as a house and have already done a lot of work on it. Now they need to have basic living conditions to move in. Each month they pay towards the cost of the house, but that leaves them with nothing to furnish it.  Our assistant, Jemal, posted their story on social media and had a fantastic response. One kind woman gave them money, so that they could buy a water pump to put in their yard. (The water pressure brought to their house is so weak, they would have not have proper water otherwise.) Other people donated furniture, household items and even doors and window.  Jemal asked our neighbour, who owns a truck, if he could help us move these items to the village. The neighbour agreed to help and only took the money for petrol.

Christine and Artur now have beds, cupboards, chairs, duvet covers, mattresses, clothes, books and toys for the kids. The whole family is so happy. Now they just have to build on another room and then they will at last be able to move in and live as an independent family for the first time in their lives.

Find out how we help homeless young people in Georgia

A volunteer’s view from our summer camp

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Our volunteer reading to childrenYulia Bondarkova has volunteered with our partners Sunflower, to help them run their summer camp for parents who grew up in orphanages and their young children.  This is her story.

“As it happened my first meeting with the families happened quite naturally – I traveled with them on the train.  We met at the station, bought our tickets, and loaded our noisy group with its bags and baggage, little children and one pregnant mother onto the train.  It was a long journey with two changes.  There was no way of knowing that these attentive, caring mothers, who were all helping each other, had had such a hard life.  Continue reading A volunteer’s view from our summer camp

Nothing is lost in Kondopoga parish

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Since 1991 St Gregory’s Foundation has worked with the exceptionally active parish in Kondopoga to serve their poor community.  During that time Russia and Kondopoga have changed greatly, but the parish continues to meet the challenges in its path.  Tamara Dragadze, one of our directors, reflects on what supporting Kondopoga has meant to her personally.

Kondopoga parish's carpentry workshopMany years ago, St Gregory’s Foundation provided funding for the parish in Kondopoga to have on its land a small sawmill and a woodwork workshop (which made furniture and used the saw wood profitably too) and all that went with it. Unfortunately in time these stopped being commercially viable and they closed. We at St Gregory’s accepted that things like that happened…

However, many years later a devoted member of their parish appeared from nowhere and decided to revive it as a centre for teaching woodwork to Continue reading Nothing is lost in Kondopoga parish