A short article from mind.ua. You can read the original here
1. Is Starenki a volunteer project?
Starenki has been a volunteer project from the very beginning. But with the creation of our own Charity Fund in 2017 and the growth of our activities, we realized that it is physically impossible to conduct orderly and systematic activities without full-time employees. Therefore, the Foundation currently has several employees who support its daily operational activities: procurement, accounting, reporting, coordination of volunteers and aid recipients.
But most of the team, including the founders, work on a volunteer basis. They are responsible for the entire creative and communication part, expansion of the fund and cooperation with donors. And, of course, Starenki is a large community of volunteers who, in fact, together with social workers deliver food packages to help elderlies. We have volunteers who have been with us since the beginning (since 2015). Can you imagine – people have been helping seniors with us for 5 years!
Therefore, we can say that Starenki is a Charitable Foundation with a volunteer essence.
We are proud of our volunteers, our team, because you need to have a very large internal reserve to constantly help someone.
2. What is the current geography of the fund? Do you manage to expand it and how?
Currently, the Fund provides assistance in Kyiv, Dnipro, Lviv and Boryslav. In Kyiv and Dnipro, we work together with Territorial Centers for the provision of social services (local divisions of social services), in Lviv and Boryslav – with Caritas.
In order to expand, the coincidence of several factors is necessary: the presence of a desire for cooperation or a direct request from the Territorial Center for the provision of social services in a new city, and an active volunteer on the spot, ready to become the coordinator of the Fund on a volunteer basis. We have a priority – regional Starenki should be created in a natural way: where the need meets the opportunity and willingness to help.
Just in May, we realized that the volume of fundraising allowed us to go to several more cities, and there were also volunteers on the ground. But it turned out that the Territorial Centers in these two cities are not at all ready for help in the format of our Fund. It seems that they have never dealt with voluntary foundations in general and do not understand why we want to distribute our help to seniors on our own. Therefore, in the near future, we will help several more Caritas units in other cities, and we will also look for more progressive and cooperative Territorial Centers in regions that really want to get help for their wards.
3. Quarantine significantly strengthened various charitable initiatives and actions. How did you work during this period? What has changed?
As for organizational changes, they were minimal: the entire Foundation team always worked remotely and we did not need to rebuild our own processes. However, during the quarantine, we had to cancel the tea parties and change the delivery format: now we bring groceries to the door and do not visit grandparents to chat and drink tea. Packaging and actual delivery take place with the necessary precautions, because the elderly are in a special risk zone in case of infection with COVID-19. We also added an informational leaflet to the packages so that the elderlies had up-to-date information: how to protect themselves from the virus and how to behave.
During the quarantine period, we really saw a huge surge of attention to the topic of helping the seniors – our fundraising tripled, many companies joined our work, and the number of volunteers doubled. It’s just incredible how adversity can bring our people together.
We cooperated with both small companies and large recognizable brands – Ukrposhta, Visa, Raketa, Uklon, Yapomoga, CAT, Ernst&Young, etc. We are sincerely grateful to absolutely everyone, but we would especially like to highlight the companies that came to help systematically and provided us with transport on a regular basis, as well as the small business that, despite such difficult conditions for itself, found the opportunity to transfer funds for basic necessities for grandparents. Thanks to this, we were able to provide an incredible amount of aid – more than 2,000 packages in March-April.
It is worth highlighting the activity of volunteers – there were a lot of them during this period and they not only participated in transportation and transferred money, but also sent us masks for the wards. At some point, we realized that the social workers were not equipped with personal protective equipment at all, and some of the masks from the volunteers began to be handed over to them. Our team also provided them with homemade antiseptic and gloves. It is a pity that social workers are so deprived of attention and no one can help them. Although their work is incredibly important, they take care of those who have no one else to help. As an example: at some point they received a directive to measure the temperature of all employees every morning, but thermometers were not provided. It’s good that we found a company that was able to quickly purchase them for us.
A lot of mass media wrote about our Foundation and assistance to the elderly, sometimes we did not have time to respond to all journalists. We really hope that attention to the problems of the elderly will not end with the quarantine. We are trying to convey to everyone: the isolation that you felt in quarantine, our wards feel all the time! Some cannot leave the house by themselves, and others are simply not noticed.
4. What are the plans for the development of the fund?
We plan to move to the regions, build volunteer communities there and promote the idea of good neighborliness. Our dream is good neighborliness in action: when seniors are noticed, when they all have someone to turn to for help, when people help those around them, and this is a normal thing for them. Do you need a charity fund to help an elderly neighbor buy medicine or repair a faucet? If people notice the elderly, then our Foundation will simply not be needed. And, in fact, this is exactly what we strive for.