Social Responsibility

Street Kids in Ukraine – Support for “Our Kids”

In a pilot project, the Berlin-based non-profit organization “Our Kids” is currently repairing a dilapidated kindergarten complex with three houses on the outskirts of Kiev for 80 homeless children. Here the street kids are for the first time being offer shelter, warm meals and help in leading a normal life. Additional houses are also planned for East Ukraine. “Our Kids” initiator Barbara Monheim has with her charity now assumed the trusteeship for the construction project for the next 49 years.

Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Eastern Europe. An increasing number of children are being forced to live on the street because their parents are dead, unemployed or violent. Without shelter and without any hope of a better future, these neglected children are forced to beg, steal or prostitute themselves just to survive. Today, there are already more than 150,000, often drug-addicted children on the streets and Ukrainian towns and villages. This number is increasing on a daily basis.

Schalast & Partner advises “Our Kids” in Germany and collaborates closely with Ukrainian attorneys with respect to registration and implementation in Kiev, as well as with the non-profit organization Deutsch-Polnisch-Ukrainische Gesellschaft e.V., which is planning further projects in Ukraine.

Our law firm also contributes towards the costs for foster parents and their training.

Since its establishment, Schalast & Partner has advised governments in Eastern Europe and supported local projects benefitting children in need.

 

Pskov Neonatal/Infants Unit

Schalast & Partner has already assumed social responsibility here in the past and together with the non-profit organization Kindernothilfe e.V helped babies in the neonatal/infants unit in Pskov/Russia.

For 50 children aged from zero to three who are mentally or physically disabled a permanent support center has been created in the city which gives these children a dignified life. In the three years in which they stay in the area specially equipped for them, the children receive holistic psychological and pedagogical care and support.

They are therefore spared a life of vegetation in Russia’s psychiatric clinics. They now have the possibility to grow up and develop in a normal environment. The infants and young children, who before the project were merely kept in cots 24 hours a day, are now being lovingly cared for by professional staff.

This groundbreaking project for Russian social work has in the meantime been successfully completed and handed over to the city of Pskov. Schalast & Partner had in recent years assumed the personnel costs for the neonatal/infants unit.