Funding Education Centre for Russian Orphans

We are so proud of our Kitezh School Director, Dr Maxim Anikeev, who won second place in an All-Russia Competition for School Directors - 500 schools from all over Russia participated. Kitezh School is already registered as an experimental school, and in the competition Maxim was given the opportunity to write about Kitezh as a 'School for Life'. He gave a talk about the innovative education methods that they use at Kitezh to develop the orphans' self esteem and sense of potential. Finally the 10 short listed directors were shown a film of a journalist researching an unsuccessful school and asked to give a 30 minute talk about the problem and how they would approach it before a professional panel: a respected researcher in educational science, a famous teacher and the best school director in Moscow, in addition to previous winners and 20 of his colleagues.  Maxim spoke about the crisis of personal development in both children and adults, and his strategy for what he nicely called "anti-crisis".  Thus you can see second place was no small achievement, even though Max is very modest about it.

As we prepare to raise the funds to build the Kitezh Education and Family Support Centre, this award gives us great confidence in the future of specialised education for foster families and orphan children as demonstrated by the Kitezh Children's Community.  

Links:

• Ecologia Youth Trust

Dear friends!

We express our sincere gratitude to everybody who helped us and donated for the construction of a new house for a big family of Orion Children’s Community! For the last two months we’ve managed to do the following work:

- external building work is finished – the roof is on and the building is water tight.

- windows are installed

- the first and second floors are built

- the ceiling on the first floor has been insulated

- walls in bathrooms are finished

- kitchen, bathrooms and utility rooms are plastered over

- materials for the walls on the second floor and flooring for the whole house are bought

 We are trying to do all the work ourselves in order not to spend money on labour costs and to save our funds for construction and decoration materials. Thanks to excellent organizational and management skills of Anton Kuzmin all materials were bought and the work was done just in time.

Children and women of Orion helped to paint the windows. While working on construction of the new house all together, the Kitezh and Orion teams became closer. In September, we expect a group of men from Kitezh to help us lay the flooring.

We need a further $14,000 to install electricity, water supply and heating. We hope to move into the house as soon as we get all this work done. If we raise the funds, we could be living there by Christmas!

Masha and Anton Kuzmin will live in the new house with their 6 children. There will be additional accommodation for guest families and volunteers. So it will also be a guest house and a training centre where visitors can live with a professional foster family and learn the basics of therapeutic work from them.

Links:

• Kitezh Orion Children's Communities