“A Door for Life” is not the only project we are working on. GEOforCHILDREN decided to support the project “Steps”, which is carried out by the Charitable Foundation for Support for Social Initiatives, led by its curator Tatiana Sorokina, who daily works with children from Bukovski and Mytischi orphanages and helps us in the organization of our activities.
The project “Steps” is a programme for social adaptation of children living in orphanages and who usually do not interact with the world outside.
The programme consists of a-few-day periods during which small groups of boys and girls get out of the orphanage and go to live in a flat in Moscow. This allows participants to go beyond the usual space and not depend on the opinion of educators, and to completely immerse themselves in a new environment for their own adult life. During these short periods children learn to rely on themselves and to become more independent. They learn how to look after the house, to go grocery shopping and make some food, to manage the money they received.
During these periods children are helped by the volunteers and by psychologists. Individual interviews with children are carried out to understand their expectations, their wishes, their ambitions, in order to better understand how we can help them. By the way, the following step, after the project “Steps”, should be the admission of these children in the project “A Door for Life”, for a continuous and targeted support towards their adult life.
Last year, the programme “Steps” involved the boys and girls from Bukovsky institute, who are now participating in the project “A Door for Life”. We see the “Steps” project as a valuable and useful programme and for this reason, GEOforCHILDREN has decided to support this programme in order to involve other children and other institutes in it. In the first months of 2017 the programme “Steps” started for a group of boys and girls from the Mytishchi institute, near Moscow.
To date, the “Steps” project is the most effective form for the social adaptation of orphans.
