Shade for Children General Fund

Practical Help, Quiet Prevention, and Hope for Families at Christmas

As the year comes to a close, we are deeply grateful for how general fund gifts were used to bring practical help and real hope to families in crisis.

Over the past quarter, your support made it possible for us to provide Christmas humanitarian aid packages — including staple groceries and, in many cases, gifts for children — to struggling families referred by our city’s social service department. These included large foster and adoptive families we support year-round, as well as mothers and children displaced by the war who are currently living in our community.

In addition to local support, we were able to sponsor three trips to Eastern Ukraine for a staff member to walk alongside a vulnerable single mother and her newborn baby. This hands-on support was part of a preventative effort to help stabilize the family and avoid institutional placement, keeping a child where they belong — with family.

While we typically focus on building this fund in December to prepare for our summer children’s camps, much of our attention this season was directed toward fundraising for Blossom Cottage. Even so, we are thankful to be entering 2026 with carry-over funds that will allow us to cover our camp venue deposit due at the end of January. This provides important continuity for the children we serve.

Thank you for standing with Shade for Children through both visible milestones and quiet, behind-the-scenes work. Your generosity continues to meet urgent needs today while laying groundwork for care, stability, and joy in the months ahead.

Because much of this work involves sensitive family situations, we often choose to prioritize privacy and dignity over photography.

Greetings from Western Ukraine,

We have two major projects to report. 

1. We once again sponsored a summer camp for children in the western Carpathian Mountains at the end of June. Your donations made it possible for us to host a diverse group of children ages 5-12 which inlcuded children from a local government orphanage, adopted children and children in foster care, children displaced by the war, and children from multiple local churches. Our volunteers were amazing, especially since the two Shade for Children directors were limited to evenings only due to a series of meetings they were required to attend throughout the week.

2. The other project has been happening over the past two weeks as Shade for Children's Ukraine Director (Lena) and our social media director, Allina, have been in Eastern Ukraine (less than 30 miles from frontline fighting) to advocate for single mother and her two children, working in tandem with two organizations in that area, one of which reached out to us for help. Some of your donated funds helped with repairs for a grandmother's apartment. They had a fire about two months ago and there had been no repairs since then. They also helped the single mother, but unfortanately, neither the organization on the ground in Zaporizhia region, nor Shade for Children, can provide the care that's really needed in this situation. We're hoping she'll move into a residential rehab center and we stand ready to support her when/if the time comes. In the meanwhile, we were able to get the youngest child, a newborn infant, out of the hospital and into custody with a family which might lead to adoption if the mother continues to be unable to care for them (or herself). Without our efforts these past few weeks, the infant for sure would have been moved to insitutional care (an orphanage) and that's no place for any child!

Thank you for your donations and your support. This is what we do with the money you provided.