Depaul Kharkiv

Depaul Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s second largest city near the border with Russia, was registered as a Ukrainian charity in April 2007. Its main focus is working with street children and young people aged 7-20 or children and young people at risk of homelessness. More recently it has begun to develop services for older homeless as well.

Since 2007 Depaul Kharkiv has worked with upwards of 500 different street children and children in state provision.

Depaul Kharkiv provides

A street outreach service, the ‘Depaulka’ minibus, offering hot food and medical assistance to street children and young people aged 7-20. It operates 6 days a week and makes 5 regular stops around the city. This was Depaul Kharkiv's first project and continues to be our best way of making initial contact with street children, building trust, and encouraging them to make use of other Depaul services.
Day centre facilities including showers, food, laundry, and a clothing bank. We have medical staff, a trained social worker, and trained teachers working at the day centre, which also operates a prevention project for referrals from local authority social services of children at risk of homelessness, eg. this may be due to their parents being violent, alcoholic or taking drugs. Educational and creative programmes are run with the children.

Depaul Kharkiv has recently expanded its services into state-run orphanages and hostels in the Kharkiv region and provides

Support to those children who in the past have run away regularly from these institutions to a life on the street. We have a specialist team of staff who visit three orphanages and one assessment hostel every week, and many of the children we have made contact with through the emergency Depaulka minibus have been persuaded to return to the safer environment of the orphanage so long as we keep on visiting them.
A leaving-care programme which has begun at Kotchetok orphanage, in our own special unit, helping 18 young people to gain lifeskills to cope with everyday living and encourage them to complete education and training in order to access employment when they leave the orphanage, instead of taking to a life on the street.

Depaul Kharkiv has also developed a further range of services in response to need, providing

A specialist prisons team which visits children and young people who have been arrested, generally for petty crime, and who need support while they are in prison or awaiting trial. In Ukraine such places are austere and basic, and Depaul Kharkiv's staff can take extra food and clean clothes, and can access the services of a legal team - a very new innovation in a country where the homeless are not usually able to ask for such help.
An emergency project working with older homeless, aged 20 and upwards, providing meals and medical aid. This is located at Gogola Street by the Cathedral in Kharkiv, and we will be looking to add on day centre facilities in the vicinity.

Depaul Kharkiv is working with other partners on new services, and in 2010 will provide

Its own hostel for homeless young people with 15 bedspaces. This is in development, in partnership with a religious order The Orione Sisters, and should come on stream in the autumn of 2010.

In March 2010 Depaul Kharkiv was invited to send a football team to the first ever Deloitte Street Child World Cup, held in Durban, South Africa. It was a chance for 9 of our young people, 7 of them from Kotchetok orphanage, to take part in the competition which also included teams of street children from Brazil, Nicaragua, Philippines, Tanzania, South Africa, India and the UK. For more information see Latest News.