ZC's "St.Petersburg - Neva" Project with the "Educational House" - a shelter for the street children and young mothers under 18 years old.

This shelter is the unique facility, only one in Russia. It was established by the city government nearly 10 years ago as a shelter and rehabilitation centre for children of 3 - 18 years old lacking in parents care, home, financial support for surviving or abandoned by their parents - alcoholics or drug-users. These children already have a heavy experience of child abuse, violence and vagrancy, usage of drugs and alcohol. All are weak in their health; some of them have chronic diseases. Among them there are children who don't speak at 6 years old and don't know writing at 14.
This shelter gives children the opportunity to live there until their future life will be somehow organised by the social services. The necessary period sometimes takes more than 1 or 2 years. Meanwhile children who are of the school age use to study in the closest to the shelter school, with which the shelter has a special agreement. Those children, who are not enough educated to attend the classes according their age, have teachers directly in the shelter (so-called "home school"). Moreover, in the shelter their exist certain number of master-classes (to detach children from the street) - carpentry, weaving, producing of "soft" toys and collages.
"Educational House " at a moment gives asylum to 245 children. It consists of the main placement (part of a big building with 6 apartments for 14-15 children in each) and 3 branches: 2 - of the same kind, but smaller in size and 1 - named "Small Mother" - for young mothers, less then 18 years old. The last branch has a very special task. According to information from the prenatal clinics and Maternity Homes, young pregnant women and new mothers of the age under 18 years old, in case if they are homeless or have problems with their parents or partners who don't want to accept them because of their babies, can also have a shelter for the period of 1 year, where they can live without abandoning their newborns. As a rule during this 1-year period family-members of these young mothers start visiting them in the shelter, feel bonded to the babies and at last take them back to their home.
From 2001 the shelter started to take over children from different regions of Russia and Republics of former USSR, who escaped from their homes and have been found in the streets or railway stations or subway in St.Petersburg. During the last year more than 200 children of such a kind were cared about in the shelter.
Up till now ZC "St.Petersburg- Neva" on the whole has been taking care of those children, who are accommodated in the main placement, by gathering clothes, shoes, toys and materials for handicrafts, enlarging the library, providing tickets to the children performances, looking for money for other needs.
The main point we give attention to since last year is finding finances for the reconstruction of the building for "Small Mother". Originally it was a building of an old kindergarten which had 32 rooms potentially suitable for life of mother-infant pairs. Nowadays only 8 rooms are totally renovated and inhabited, the less 24 are still need to be repaired. To provide money we started additional sub-project with our friendly St.Petersburg Club Soroptimist-Neva - the co-operation in the question of charity concerts of the member of this club - well-known piano player Natalia Gorbenko and her partner - Mikhail Sentchourov, Conservatory professor , playing classical Russian balalaika. Their charity concerts, in which they performed music of Mozart, List, Schubert, Rossini, Tschaikovsky and other composers for the reason of previous Club projects already took place in the end of 1990-th in Germany with the promotion of different German ZCs.
The negotiations with ZC Stockholm-4 about the charity concerts for the sake of St.Petersburg "Educational House" for street children and young mothers are taking place nowadays.
We already got some private financial support for this Project from several Dutch and German zontians.
We invite all Zonta clubs of our district to join us.

ZC "St.Petersburg-Neva", Russia