Services in Ukraine
Depaulka street outreach
- The Depaulka minibus offers hot food and medical assistance to street children and young people aged 7-20. It operates six days a week and makes five regular stops around the city. This was Depaul Kharkiv's first project, developed as a safety net, and it 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
- Facilities for children living on the street: these include showers, food, laundry, and a clothing bank. We have medical staff, a trained social worker, and trained teachers working at the day centre.
- Prevention project: recieves referrals from local authority social services of children at risk of homelessnessess. This may be due to their parents being violent, alcoholic or taking drugs. Educational and creative programmes are run by trained teachers with the children.
Orphanages and hostels
Depaul Kharkiv has recently expanded its services into state-run orphanages and hostels in the Kharkiv region.
- Support: We provide outreach to those children who 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.
- Kotchetok leaving-care programme: In our own special unit within an orphanage we help 18 young people to gain lifeskills they need 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.
Prisons
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, as well as 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.
Gogola Street for older homeless
An emergency project working with older homeless, aged 20 and upwards, providing meals and medical aid in partnership with a religious order, the Orione Sisters. 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.
In development
Depaul Kharkiv is working with other partners on new services, and in Autumn 2010 will open its own hostel for homeless young people with 15 bedspaces. This development is in partnership with a religious order, the Orione Sisters.
Depaul Kharkiv aims to become sustainable in the long term by building its governance, administrative and fundraising base in-country. It is able to access staff exchanges and mentoring arrangements across the Depaul Group in order to ensure highly trained and motivated staff and volunteer teams, and has its own recruitment and training programmes for both staff and volunteers.
