Dear Friends,

On the 20th of October me and Emma will be climbing Kilimanjaro.
This is going to be an amazing adventure and personal challenge! Doing climbs like this requires lots of self-management, physical and emotional preparation, self discipline, desire to learn and discover.

Unfortunately, due to issues with social adaptation, most of the deprived young people in our societies are not capable of handling personal challenges, managing themselves and as a result, fail to create a beautiful and happy life for themselves. That is why we would like to devote this Kilimanjaro challenge to fundraise for the Youth Development Centre for deprived children in Russia.

Why this cause is important.

Orphanages in Russia provide food, clothes, school education, help of psychologists and still eight out of ten orphans do not adapt to society and become alcohol, drugs addicted or homeless!

This happens as children are not ready emotionally to become independent, they don’t have a feeling of self-agency – being a person who knows how to manage its own life what normally children learn from parents and positive role models in their circle.

Individual mentoring and personal development opportunities can compensate this. For these reasons, London based charity Warmed Heart www.warmedheart.org.uk in cooperation with international charity Big Brothers Big Sisters Russia http://nastavniki.org/, would like to create in Moscow a Youth Development Center for deprived children of 7- 23 y.o.

The aim of the Centre is to provide access to development outside of traditional school program in order to help to acquire mindset and soft skills important for social success as well as to foster personal development for deprived children. The center planned to serve around 30 children per year from Moscow based and regional orphanages.

At the first stage, the following programs are to be launched on the ongoing basis:

- 6 months Leadership development journey, for teenagers and young adults 17 – 23 y.o. The aim of the leadership program is to provide young adults with critical skills to future: effective communication, goal setting, conflict management, time management, financial literacy and professional orientation, stress management.

Also, this will include sessions throughout the year with young inspirational leaders - successful entrepreneurs, start-upers, high achievers in sport, art and other fields.

This program will be developed by talent development professionals from international corporate sector in cooperation with children psychologists of BBBSS.

- Acting school with involvement of professional cinema & theatre teachers: acting helps not only to develop artistic talent, but also to open up emotionally and become comfortable with self-expression and public communication.

- Chess classes : chess helps to develop strategic and disciplined thinking.

This to be launched in 2018 with the plan of further expansion of the program.

The yearly budget required to launch and run the program is 10.000 GBP. The budget will cover salary to additional 3 children psychologists to be hired by BBBS, administrative costs for premises rental, educational equipment, transportation of children from regional orphanages, food and other.

We believe that the Youth Development Centre will help deprived children to become self-sufficient people who are emotionally, mentally and skill wise ready for challenges of modern society.

We hope you would like to become a part of this project and we will be making positive changes together!

Anna and Emma