Friday 26 November 2010

Elderly Community Care

A new project starting in November is called Elderly Community Care and pictured left is the Manager, centre, surrounded by the volunteers. We have been supporting elderly people in the Colony Community for several years but we wanted to take a more planned approach as well as involving dedicated local volunteers. 20 elderly people were selected by Social Work volunteers and the manager, Adina as needing our help. Each person has an Individual Action Plan and we will be finding ways of helping and involving them at every step.
This Christmas we will be providing a food parcel, funded by our Christmas Appeal in the UK and at the moment we have enough to purchase 12 parcels. If you would like to donate £10 to provide one food parcel for an elderly person please donate on line through our website or post a cheque to the Charity office in Hassocks.
We have contacted Link Romania a UK Charity and they will be sending Shoe Boxes, so we will give a Christmas gift to each of our elderly people along with an item of warm clothing.
This is an ongoing project and we really hope that we can get a good group of volunteers involved to take this forward as a community building initiative.

Recent Events

Boxes full of specialist toys for our " Toy for Every Child" project have arrived in Romania, the photo on the left shows them loaded in my car ready to be taken to the truck depo. The project we are supporting is written by the St Andrews Association and is made up of teachers and parents of children with special needs based at the school in Vulcan.
Together, we decided that a toy library would really benefit the children and parents who could use them during home time and holidays.
Specialist toys are expensive in Romania so we decided to buy them in the UK and ship them to Petrosani, the photo on the right shows Larisa with the school Director collecting the boxes from our centre in Petrosani. The shipping costs were off set by the support of Wilkinsons Store who gave a gift voucher to spend on new toys and by the donation of good quality second hand toys by supporters. All the toys were sent packed in special plastic toy boxes and any spare space was filled with goodies for the school to use.