News

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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Communication Space helps Ilya

Posted on By Sarah.SGF
Ilya

Iya is 27 years old. Since birth, he has suffered from profound intellectual, visual, and motor impairments. He was also diagnosed with autism. Ilya is one of 20 children and young people who benefit from personalised help at the Communication Space Centre, which assists with their communication and independent living.

Due to his severe impairments, Ilya is unable to use communication books and pictures, relying only on natural gestures and pointing to objects. He fears and avoids unfamiliar public places, which can often lead to epileptic seizures. Ilya lives with his mother, Irina, and needs constant care and support from adults.

Last year the Centre’s specialists helped Ilya to adapt better to new places. He has become particularly good at understanding the difference between a hardware store and a grocery store, and he behaves differently in them. Grocery stores are his favourite! The main positive changes in his communication are related to food—it is during meals that Ilya began to initiate contact more often. At home, he has learned to rely on the daily routine.

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News from Moldova: Rain Kids

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Five-year-old Alex lives in Chişinău with his family. The family turned to the Rain Kids Centre when it became clear that Alex was developmentally delayed. Their ambitions are simple, and ones most of the parents share: “I wanted Alex to start talking, eat independently, dress and undress by himself, to be more autonomous, to socialize.”

The staff at Rain Kids are very motivated to help the children in their care reach these goals. Last year, we helped them by providing supervision from an experienced practitioner from Romania. Now, we are funding Rain Kids’ lead therapist, Ana Cislaru, to raise her qualifications so she can offer training and supervision to her 8 colleagues.

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Alternative Communication improves every aspect of life

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Andrei is 21 and he has Fragile X Syndrome, which affects his learning ability. He has been coming to Communication Space for group and individual sessions for more than ten years.

Alternative Communication is helping him in so many areas of his life. He uses the centre’s visual timetable and timers to understand what is going on through the day, which helps him stay calm.

He continues to make progress with his communication book. He can put together simple phrases and knows around 300 symbols. He can ask for help or ask for a break if an activity is getting too much. He has even started keep fit exercises using visual prompts. Now Andrei is working on the skills he will need to start using a tablet to communicate.

Communication Space write on their website:

People think that it’s all good here. And it really is good. But it didn’t happen by accident. It is the result of our accumulated experience and constant effort, which we put into creating a welcoming space, building a good team, putting together our programme, establishing our relationship with families. It’s good here because we don’t rely on formal interactions where the teaching task or organisational task is the most important, but on humanity.

What is for sure is that without the ability to communicate, it would all fall apart. Finding ways to communicate with those who can’t use speech is the key.

Help more people benefit from Alternative Communication

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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The value of a good supervisor

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Since we started working together, The Rain Kids Centre’s goal has been to improve the quality of the therapy they are able to offer children with developmental disabilities, such as autism. St Gregory’s has been funding supervision by an experienced therapist from Romania. She has visited to observe the work of the centre and provide training sessions.

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SGF supporters visit Mkurnali, Georgia

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

Our recent fundraising trip to Georgia was an eye-opener for St Gregory’s supporters. Not only did we enjoy the famous Georgian hospitality with our Mkurnali partners, but we also were given the full tour of the shelter we sponsor, including a jewellery-making workshop. This shelter gives a home to young people who faced homelessness or experienced the criminal justice system. Here they also find a pathway to a vocation and an entirely new life.

The shelter provides a variety of workshops, including jewellery-making, car and printer repair and more. We also viewed the newly renovated loft completed by Nino Chubabria and her team, designed to house more families and youths. The immediate goal is to furnish two rooms, with a local donor already contributing a sofa and a toddler bed. Future plans might involve purchasing a garage near the shelter to start an income-generating venture like bicycle repair, offering valuable apprenticeship opportunities. The late George Guest, one of our main supporters of Mkurnali, was passionate about developing Mkurnali’s infrastructure, and his legacy continues to support these efforts.

Currently, Mkurnali is home to approximately 15 young people and two families. Four children, between one to ten years old, live there with their parents. Our group congratulated Christina, who has become Georgia’s official athletics champion and was recently featured on a TV programme, the Georgian equivalent of Little Big Shots.

Progress for Gordei

Posted on By Sarah.SGF

7 year-old Gordei has been making great progress with his communication book thanks to the skilled professionals at Communication Space.

St Gregory’s works in partnership with Communication Space to introduce alternative technology to Russia to benefit people with disabilities. Gordei is one of the children who has recevied bespoke teaching, opening up new ways of communicating.

Gordei has cerebral palsy, which affects his ability to speak. fortunately, his parents found Communication Space, and he is now learning how to use PECS – a language of visual symbols contained in his communication book.

Until recently, Gordei would only use one symbol at a time. He would rely on the person he was “talking” to being able to guess what he meant. The therapists at Communication Space have made some simple adjustments to the way the symbols are arranged in his book, and now he is putting two or even three symbols together in phrases. Recently, in answer to the question, “How are you?”, Gordei answered “bad” and then himself found the symbol for “cold”. It is already becoming easier for those around him to understand Gordei. The solutions may seem simple, but it takes skill, empathy and patience to make this kind of breakthrough. We are so glad our colleagues are helping train others so that many more children like Gordei can express themselves.

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.

Read the newsletter’s first story

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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