Romania
We work with three organisations in Romania: FAST, Casa Mea and The Atelier Sacelean Association.
FAST
FAST is short for "Fundatia pentru Asistenta Sociala si Tineret," which means the "Foundation for Social Assistance and Youth." FAST runs a range of projects improving the lives of children and families in the marginalised Roma communities, around the area of Sacele. FAST was started in 1998 by Daniel and Ema Hristea, an inspirational couple, who felt it was their calling to help the disadvantaged and needy children in their country.
FAST’s projects include building better homes for families, running educational programmes, as well as a music school, and much more! We want to contribute towards these projects. As well as making donations, it is also possible to volunteer with FAST.
We completed the ‘Ten for Ten’ Campaign to help one of the many families which FAST supports. This family has ten children, and has been living in abject poverty in the Roma village of Tarlungeni. The photo above shows four of the ten siblings. Their father, Sorin, desperately wanted to work to support his children, but communities like his are often cut off from the local economy. We raised the two thousand five hundred pounds necessary to build a carpentry workshop so he could start a business, and support each of his children, bringing them out of the cycle of poverty. When the children are grown up, they could also join the business and provide for themselves, so this project will have an impact through the generations. Daniel of FAST will keep us updated with the progress. A very big thank you to everyone who supported this appeal!
Casa Mea
Casa Mea is an organisation dedicated to providing loving group homes for orphaned and abandoned children. At present, Casa Mea owns a house in Prejmer, where up to twelve children can live, although there are currently fewer children than this. Casa Mea will ensure that these children grow up in a loving, family environment.
Executive Director, Jan Calos, established Casa Mea in Romania and spent time looking after the children herself. We are very happy to be able to fundraise to help support the good work of Casa Mea.
We were able to give a donation of one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds to pay the salary of a carer for a year. We are currently trying to raise this amount again to pay the carer's salary for another year.
We want to be able to continue making donations towards the salaries of the staff at Casa Mea and are looking for people who can either help fundraise or donate towards this. The children have experienced such hard times in their short lives, before being fortunate enough to go to live at Casa Mea. It is vital that there are enough people to work with the children once they get there. CHW would like to keep making donations to cover the costs of employing one staff member for a year. We would then hope to raise that amount each consecutive year to keep sponsoring the staff member. We are hoping too, that eventually, we would be able to raise enough to then sponsor more than one member of staff. These are big plans, so we have to start small! It would be wonderful if you were able to contribute to this. Either one-off donations or continuous ones (where you can make regular donations each month) would be so good.
The Atelier Sacelean Association
The Atelier Sacelean Association runs educational projects for underprivileged children in Sacele. This includes running programmes at its educational centre all year round and holding a summer camp. The Association helps children from very poor families and also has links with orphanages in the area. Until the Sacele Hospital was recently shut down, it also ran a care programme for the children and babies admitted there.
The Founder of the Association, Cristina Birsan, has encouraged people both from Romania and abroad to get involved through volunteering with the programmes.
Our past projects have included raising money to support the programme at the hospital, arranging clothes collections, where the clothes were distributed to children in the hospital and to other underprivileged children in Sacele and raising money to repair computers at the educational centre.
