Our history
Children and their families are at the center of everything we do!
We are deeply convinced that children are a priceless gift for humanity. Every child, regardless of his or her ethnos and social status, is worthy of investment into his or her physical, emotional and spiritual development. We dedicate our work to the future generation of Bulgaria. This attitude of ours is the reason why ever since its founding in 2005, the Foundation has been working to ensure better life and equal opportunities for children living in an institution, or in poor families, or having trouble with their education and development.
2005 – Helping Hand Foundation is a nongovernmental organization, established in November 2005 by Albena Boneva and several of her close friends who were longing to help those in need of support to live decent lives. All workers realize the great privilege they have. Work begins in the Home for children depraved of parental care in Dobrich.
2005 – 2007
So, in 2005 our team, consisting of six volunteers, started working with children from the Daga Home in Dobrich. The home houses 53 children aged from 7 to 18. We got in touch with many children’s destinies which would be forever marked by the fact that they had been deserted by their parents. We could see that for those kids the security, coming from parental love, did not exist. For the last several years we have been looking for the most suitable approach to help those children. We started with personal meetings and friendly conversations, helping them with their home works, having art classes, organizing job training courses.
2008
We gradually came to realize that it is of utmost importance to work with them daily in an atmosphere of acceptance and understanding. In the beginning of 2008 we applied to the Municipality and the city council unanimously decided to let us use an area on the first floor of the Daga Home, for free. We renovated and furnished thhe premises and in March 2008 the Center for Social Rehabilitation and Integration for the children in the Home was officially launched.
2009
2009 was the year of our most intense work with the children from the Home. In December 2008 our organization started work on the Life in Dignity for the Children of Dobrich project. It was financed by the Phare Program for Deinstitutionalization Through Community Services for Children in Risk Groups. The result of this work was that there were formed three Family-like Centers and the Center for Community Support was established. Some of the worst problems in the Home were solved, like: bad living conditions, not enough people on the staff of the Home to work with the children, little individual work with the children, non-existent work with the parents of the children.
2010-2011
In the process of work we learned more and more about the stories of the children and we found out that many had been sent to the home, because of the extreme poverty of their parents, who had no jobs or/and homes, they had no way out or simply no one had ever taught them how importat their role as parents is to the child. We did our own research and it turned out that only 2% of the children in such homes are true orphans – the rest of them have living parents.
So in 2010 we started working on prevention of the abandoning of children in social homes. A large part of our activities were being financed by the Tulip and the Oak foundations within the project “Support for Families and Children for a Better Life”. Our primary goal became helping parents to deal with their situations and thus prevent their children from being sent to an institution. Our close encounters with these parent have tought us to accept them just the way they are, without judging their weaknesses or even their lack of responsibility. We were ready to listen to them, to understand them and to seek ways to help them. We do not give up and never stop telling them that they are the most important people in their children’s lives and that they are the ones who are able to love them the best way possible.
FOUNDATION