Author: Zuzana Šrámková
As some of you already know, we regularly have team meetings with our clowns, mentors and teachers, but on October 6, 2022, we held our first ever meeting with the directors of children’s homes! (Imagine the fanfare here 😊)
We invited our distinguished guests to the Corinthia Hotel in Prague, told them about the history of our organization and introduced all of our various programs. We covered especially the Robin Hood and Springboard to Life programs, which have a lot to offer especially to orphanages.
After a short refreshment break, we focused on another important point of our programme, which is the HelpMate initiative – C4C’s online learning platform for educators in orphanages and other foster care facilities, which you may have already read about here (we are preparing a separate article on further development of the project).
“Meetings like this make a lot of sense to me,” says Petra Erguvanli, Springboard to Life coordinator, who came up with the idea of inviting the directors to Prague. “We need to deepen the relationship with the directors of the orphanages and communicate with them to know what their particular orphanage needs. Some of them we met for the first time in person. We will definitely meet regularly.”
“I am very happy about the impact of HelpMate,” smiles Markéta Franke, who, together with Petra, manages the training platform and communicates with the trainees. “The feedback motivates us to make further modules, because the activities that we guide the educators from the children’s homes through, not only have an impact on their attitude toward work, but also overlap with their personal lives.”
After the meeting, there was a literal avalanche of interest in all that C4C has to offer orphanages.
“The interest is so overwhelming that I am reworking my strategy for distributing material aid to the children´ homes,” laughs Zuzana Šrámková, coordinator of the Robin Hood programme. “The homes have connected with each other, so we will try to distribute the aid in such a way that the material donations will go directly to them and will not have to go through the sorting process in our warehouse in Kladno every time. And I really enjoyed meeting people in person who I often only know as names in my email database.”
And so from Chance 4 Children, we thank all the directors who, in between all the administration and other duties, found time to come to Prague (even from such a distance as Valašské Meziříčí 😊). It was an extremely nice meeting and we look forward to the next one.
We also thank from the bottom of our hearts the management of the Corinthia Hotel, who provided us with a complementary meeting space and refreshments. Thank you very much!!!!
