All employees and volunteers of the Happy Child charity foundation want to thank you for your great support!
This year was very important for our charity. We collected about $820 000 this year, so we have much more projects, and much more work to do, of course. The amount of donated money increased in 2,4 times!!! Yes, we had one big donation from one sponsor, but even without it we have more donations (3,312 donations in 2012 and 5,440 in 2013). All financial reports you can see on our website – www.deti.zp.ua/eng/helped.php
Financial results are important, but they are not the only indicators of our work. Some projects consume small money, but are very important. Besides, when we buy medical equipment, medicine, build Happy Home for orphans and do other projects, we try to save as much money as we can, find things for best prices. Many prices can be checked by everyone in our reports, and I think these are really good prices.
The main projects in 2013 were rebuilding work on the second Happy Home for disabled orphans in Kalinovka (will be opened in February or March 2013), buying medical equipment (about $100,000 spent for this purpose), direct help to the 249 sick children of the Zaporozhzhye region and 48 sick adults from all over Ukraine (“Helpus” project for helping adults). We also continue our tourist program for orphans and children from large and low-income families. We organized dozens of camping trips, one day excursions and other activities for more than 900 children this year.
That’s all thanks to people who trust us and really wish to help others. These are Ukrainians and foreigners, young and old, poor and rich – just people, who wish happiness not only for themselves, but also for others.
We send special thanks to our donors, who live in other countries, but anyway have enough wish to help children so far away from their native countries. It’s a good example for us, Ukrainians, and I hope one day more Ukrainians will also help people abroad.
Of course, we are not an ideal organization and always have some internal problems and space for improving our work. But this year we have done something to improve management and accountability. We have new internal accounting system and database of donors, volunteers, beneficiaries of our charity campaigns. We update our financial statement on the website every day and have full control of how much money each project consumes and receives. We made small updates of our websites, but completely new design and functionality of the websites will appear in spring 2014.
We currently have 10 employees at the office – Albert (director), Irina and Tanya (accountants), Roman (PR and medical equipment), Maria (coordinates Kalinovka orphanage and other orphanages, young and older orphans with mental disorders and learning difficulties), Alina and Elena (help sick children), Olga (coordinates charity campaigns for sick children and adults), Anna (coordinates our family care program, creating orphans’ profiles), Sergey (our fundraiser, fixes donation boxes), Dasha (our website administrator and translator). Yuliya and Anton work on the tourist program as part time employees. There are also many volunteers from Ukraine and abroad who kindly support us with translating the articles you read from/into English, Russian and German.
If we have the same growth of work next year, we will need to hire 2-3 more employees.
To cover service needs is always a problem for every organization, including ours. But, thanks God, we have some ‘friends of the charity’ who cover salaries of some employees and office rent. Another uncovered part of service expenses we take from the unrestricted donations. We try to spend as little as possible for service needs, but at the same time without service expenses and fundraising expenses we would not have the results we have had this year. So, we especially thank those donors, who have deep trust in us and help us to cover service expenses.
Hope you will have a wonderful holiday season with your family and friends!
We also hope someday you can come to Ukraine and meet us!
May the good you do for Ukrainian children always come back to you!
Best regards,
Albert Pavlov and the Happy Child team
www.deti.zp.ua/eng info@deti.zp.ua
