Home visits stop Polina and family slipping through the net

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

With support from St Gregory’s, our colleagues at Sunflower run support groups for young people living in children’s homes and those who have recently left. They have recently extended their service to offer home visits from a social worker to a few young mums who don’t yet feel ready to join their support group specifically for parents.

Polina* is one of those parents. She is mum to a one year old little girl, who she is raising on her own in a one room flat. Polina herself left home at 13 and was taken into care. Her older sister took custody of her when she was 16. At 20 she started living independently and very soon got pregnant. Polina is focussed on making sure that her daughter is fed and clothed, which she is doing well. Her daughter is physically healthy, but she finds it difficult to bond with her, and uses friends to babysit as often as she can.

Polina feels to anxious to visit the support group, so the home visits are an important way of keeping in touch. Our colleagues are teaching her to recognise how her daughter is communicating her needs. They are also helping Polina and other mums access help, particularly a nursery place for her daughter so that she can learn to socialise with other children. These are the first small steps on what we hope will be a longer journey, that will give Polina the confidence and the parenting skills she needs to break the cycle of disadvantage.

* Because of the family’s vulnerability, we have changed the name and appearance.

Sunflower summer camps

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

This photo represents a touching moment in the life of Sunflower’s summer camp. Six families: mothers who grew up in children’s homes, one grandad who is raising his grandaughter, and their young children went away for six days to work on their parenting skills. This vital work helps prevent the next generation suffering from their parent’s childhood trauma.

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At the start there was some tension. Everyone was getting used to the new conditions, and the weather meant they were all cooped up indoors. The children didn’t listen to their parents, and also didn’t turn to them when they needed help. They preferred to play on their own and would argue or run off when they were brought together. Yet, by the end of the summer camp, they shared this impromptu moment of togetherness. Tolya had found a ‘treasure’ and his friends were all eager to see what it was.

To get to this point took a lot of work, work which started right at the start of this year when the parents articulated what they wanted to get out of it. They all expressed the difficulty they had in getting their children to listen. During the six days of the camp, a key goal was to help the parents observe their children more closely, to read the signs that show what they need physically and emotionally. One mother said at the end, ‘I have begun to notice where I put pressure on my child. For now it’s difficult to do differently, but the main thing is that I notice those moments.’ Through play therapy and creative activities, the parents were helped to understand why their children refused to play with them, or got angry. Rather than mirroring their children’s behaviour, they learned ways to gently draw their children into the game.

Meanwhile, in the children’s group, the children were also encouraged to recognise and name their emotions. They began to take turns and even tried to resolve their own conflicts. When the group met up back in St Petersburg, they could all look back on many happy and creative moments. All are working hard to carry what they learned into their daily lives.

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Change to this year’s summer camps

Posted on By Sarah.SGF
Mother and toddler daughter painting together

On April 20, volunteers from “Sunflower” headed to Dolbeniki and got to work cleaning up the site, including the kitchen, fire pit, and bathhouse. While there, they ran into a big problem: the small pond that had always provided water for showers, the bathhouse, and dishwashing had dried up. Drinking water was always brought in from a nearby village, but without the pond, there’s no way to get enough water for a group—especially families. Talks are ongoing with the site owners to figure out solutions. One idea is drilling a well, but it’s tricky because water layers are deep in the Valdai Hills, and finding a reliable source could mean multiple expensive attempts.

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Winter newsletter out now

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Our winter newsletter is out now. You can read how your generous response to our summer appeal allowed us to rebuild the dining room of the Sunflower summer camp after it was destroyed by fire.

Many of the stories in this issue are about the difference your donations are making to disabled young people. We have Ilya, who is suprising his mother by making great progress even at the age of 27. We have news from Rain Kids in Chişinău, Moldova, who are benefitting from training for a key member of staff.

Our Christmas appeal this year is to help Adelina and other children who like her have special needs in Calarasi, Moldova. Can you help us raise £5,000 to fund a speech therapist and a special needs teacher for one year?

Finally, if you download the PDF version of the newsletter, you will find extra stories and details of our Christmas cards and gifts, which didn’t fit in the blog.

Read the newsletter’s first story

Sunflower: licensed to train

Posted on By Sarah.SGF
Sunflower group standing with forest in the background

Quality recognised

Our partners Sunflower have come a long way since we helped them get started 17 years ago. For some years we have been helping fund them to run training courses for social workers and psychologists. Now the quality of these courses has been recognised. They have received a licence as a training organisation and are able to issue certificates for the courses they offer on effectively supporting orphanage-leavers and foster or adoptive families. Their teaching is helping to raise the level of care across St Petersburg, the Leningrad region and beyond.

Summer camps revived

Thank you to everyone who contributed to our appeal to restore the Sunflower summer camp. Their dining area is now usable again after being destroyed by fire in 2023. The summer camps are held in a very special place and Sunflower use their surroundings well. A walk through the forest to the local sand quarry is a highlight of both summer camps, for young families and for the teenagers.

Our colleagues say this about the children’s experience this year:

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Transformative summer camps

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Each year our partners at Sunflower take two small groups away on summer camp. Six young adults who have just left their children’s home, and five families with young children took part this year. Although the beautiful rural surroundings are a wonderful escape from the city, this is not just a holiday. Everyone who takes part has been selected because they are prepared to work intensively on improving their relationships, on making responsible choices and on becoming more resilient.

Sunflower young people

group of young people
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May newsletter out now

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Our May newsletter is out now, including a round up of our news from Moldova, Georgia and Russia. You will see how your donations are being used to support Luisa, who found herself homeless in Tbilisi, and Vika in St Petersburg, whose mother died. We report on our colleagues who are teaching others how to adapt books for people with a range of disabilities, and providing the only therapy available for children with special needs in Călărași, Moldova.

An urgent problem we have this year is helping Sunflower recover from a fire at their summer camp base. This was caused last year by a fault at a local substation. Sunflower have managed to get the lights back on, and have also fundraised locally to replace damaged kitchen equipment. What they now need help with is transport both for their new equipment and for their volunteers, and food to sustain the volunteers as they make the site ready for this year’s camp.

Check out our appeal page if you would like to help.

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Vika’s story

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

In some ways, Vika is not typical of the young people that Sunflower help. She is actually an orphan – her mother died when she was 16 – and she is living in an institution until the paperwork is completed on the flat she is entitled to.

The majority of the young people in these institutions are there because their parents were not capable of looking after them. Sunflower has also recently started accepting young people who have grown up in foster care or an adoptive family onto its programme. What they all have in common is an experience of trauma. They are all alone in the world, without family to guide or support them.

Vika explains something of what life has been like:

“I have lived all my life in St Petersburg. Me and Ilya are twins. I ended up in a children’s home after the authorities turned up at home. We had a lot to deal with in our life, we were hiding from the pandemic, there wasn’t any money then, we often moved around, we lived in Krasnogorodsk near Pskov, where Mama got ill and died. Then Dad (she calls her step-father dad) started drinking. It was scary. It was a good thing that we ended up in a children’s home, there we get all our benefits, and they’ve even shown us a flat in our own district. That’s some kind of luck.”

Vika is carrying a lot of responsibility. She worries very much about her brother, who she says is depressed. She can’t imagine life without him. She finds it difficult and frightening to think about the future.

Vika is really benefiting from Sunflower’s individual counselling. It doesn’t just allow her to get things off her chest, but to put the events of her life in order and to think about them clearly and calmly. She also goes to the group meetings once a month.

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Sunflower summer camp for families

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Six families with children aged 5 to 11 took part in Sunflower’s summer camp this year. The venue this year was different: they stayed at a centre in Komarovo beside the Finnish Gulf as the log cabin (the dacha) required some repair and later a dramatic fire happened at the site.

A new location offered lots of scope for outdoor fun and games, and as usual special training was organised for both parents and children. Many of the activities related to the levels of freedom and responsibility that the parents give their children as they grow and establishing an appropriate balance. The children were able to explore the theme too through a fairy story, ‘Dwarf Long-nose’ in which a little boy has to cope with a magical transformation so complete that his parents don’t recognise him.

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Fire at Dolbeniki

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

This is the scene in Dolbeniki at the dacha used by Sunflower for their summer camps. A serious accident at a local electrical substation led to a power surge and a wave of fires hit the area.

The free-standing dining room caught fire immediately, destroying the building, the furniture and also the kitchen equipment, which was stored there. Fortunately, no-one was hurt. The fire brigade arrived swiftly and the fire was extinguished. It did not spread to any of the other buildings used during the summer camps.

Sunflower are assessing the damage and the cost of creating a new eating area so that they can run summer camps there again. Meanwhile, volunteers have started to clear the site already, although the weather will soon force a break in the work. Serious work will start in spring 2024, when we hope to be able to help Sunflower recover.

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