Welcome to the website of the Relief Fund for Romania. We are a UK / Romanian charity organisation helping a wide range of groups in need in Romania, including street children, the sick, the elderly and destitute communities.

Checkout this short video about our IMPART model

Read about our Projects

See How You Can Help

Read our Latest Report

We fund Romanian partner charities to run various long-term community based relief projects. Plus we also run our own charity projects


Here's what we've done recently

Our partner charity Fundatia de Sprijin Comunitar - The Community Support Foundation celebrates 10 great years of existence

When we helped our Romanian employees set up their own autonomous charity 10 years ago we would have been very surprised - and thrilled - to see how much they have achieved. Here's how they summarised it:

• We are very proud to say that we are among a small number of NGOs in Romania that were able to start large programmes that are still viable.
  
• We served over 25,000 people,
  
• We have created jobs for 200 people, of which 10 have been working with us since the registration in 1997
  
• We were granted the Public Utility Title by the Government
  
• We obtained many national awards
  
• we networked for the development of the NGO sector and of the legislation that governs the services
  
  FSC representatives participated in the last quarter at several national seminars, conferences and NGO meetings where the name of the organization was referred to as being “serious, professional and representative for the NGO sector”.

Read all about their work in their latest quarterly report

We got a big boost when the renowned actor Adrian Paul - who stars in the Highlander TV hit and has made many films - made a generous donation to our street children’s refuge project see below via his PEACE Fund last year. He has just repeated this kindness with another significant donation in February 2008. We are honoured by this kind man's continued support.

Our street children’s refuge

This project is run by a great team of dedicated young Romanians. Every day they patrol the streets of Bacau NE Romania – a major railway hub – looking for new faces among the homeless children. The aim is to intervene as soon as possible before the young runaways get too used to life on the streets.

The children are taken to our refuge where they get a safe, caring, family style home. Then together we start on the long road to getting them back to school, reuniting them with their families - or fostered into a good home. Without your valuable help none of this would be possible.

The project was visited by the EU Ambassador to Romania, Mr Jonathan Scheele.

He remarked …“seeing this work and the children makes me confident that all the funding that gets to this organisation is properly spent. “

Outstanding young teenage volunteers, from the local High Schools, help enormously by taking the children to activities like football and swimming. They also give them a taste of family life when they take them home for a family meal.

We have also repaired and decorated the refuge. Fifteen of the longer stay children were taken on a family type holiday to the seaside.

Home Care of the Elderly

This year we are caring for 365 elderly people in their own homes. As a result of the growing reputation of the team’s kindness and caring, we are being referred more and more people with terminal illness for palliative care. The project expanded to 4 more regions This is the only programme in the NE of Romania offering home care and nursing services to unwell, old people.

An evaluation by the Romanian authorities said the programme was … “unique in Romania in the high standards of care and dedication to the old people who are cared for”.

A further 250 people attended our Day Centre.

This was renamed The Dr Stefan Ciobanu Day Centre in honour of our friend and colleague, Stefan Ciobanu, who was killed in a car accident. Stefan inspired and led the project. It will remain a great legacy for a good man who died so tragically young

Arts Therapy for the Disabled for children and adults with special needs

This year our Impart project has trained 500 carers in various regions of Romania.

They also delivered our programme of therapeutic arts to 650 severely disabled children and adults in orphanages and psychiatric hospitals.

We also continued to lobby for national accreditation of the role of the Combined Arts Worker with various Romanian government departments.

With our various partners we continue to develop the national network in Romania of people working through the arts for children and adults with disability.

We published 3 “Impreuna” magazines (meaning "together") and distributed them to 2,100 key individuals, free of charge.

Our interactive community arts website is being redesigned and relaunched. This will be an invaluable resource for the dedicated, but all too often badly isolated, workers in this field.

Mobile Health Care and Mobile Pharmacy

We continue this long running project by delivering vital health care and medicines to 14,752 people in remote villages in NE Romania.

This has been called the poorest area in Europe.

The Out of the Poverty project donates children’s clothes, basic food supplies, chickens, goats to 257 of the poorest families.

We have recently expanded our work in this area with a major grant to set up a team of Mobile Community Workers to help these families, who are often badly isolated in hard-to-reach villages in the countryside.

Funding

For our last accounts year - 2006 - we spent £194,511 on our charity work in Romania, as well as many gifts-in-kind

We also paid for various direct charity expenses in the UK such as sponsoring the costs of expert volunteers.

We funded 6 Romanian charities directly who are delivering help to those most in need through 12 different programmes.

These included: a dynamic young charity called FAST in Brasov, central Romania, who we helped to deliver social support and educational projects in poor Roma communities.

In Bucharest we continued to support the Budimex, a major Children’s Hospital.

We maintained our significant support of national TB treatment programme.

We helped the chraity Estuar’s Day Centre for people with mental illness where the beneficiaries cook a hot meal for each other twice a week. – a great social event and a source of much needed nutrition.

The Relief Fund Team